Complaint
A viewer complained that a guest in the programme, the Conservative MP Wendy Morton, had been wrong in claiming the development of Covid vaccines in the UK as a benefit of Brexit, and Laura Kuenssberg has also been wrong to interject “there’s a whole debate about whether or not the UK could have done that while still inside the European Union or not” because it was a matter of fact, not debate, that EU law had posed no impediment to the process. The ECU considered the complaint in the light of the BBC’s editorial standards of accuracy.
Outcome
While accepting that it would have been possible under EU law for the UK to develop and approve vaccines independently, the ECU did not consider either contribution to the exchange sufficiently precise to warrant construing it entirely in legal terms (rather than in terms of how far the UK Government might have felt able to act independently if there had been no Brexit process, which was necessarily a matter of debate rather than fact). In the light of the imprecision of the exchange, and because Ms Kuenssberg’s interjection had the general effect of rebutting Ms Morton’s claim to have identified a demonstrable benefit of Brexit, the ECU judged that there had not been a departure from the standard of accuracy due in this context.
Not upheld