Rishi Sunak has a new strategy to appeal to young voters. The Prime Minister donned a pair of Adidas Sambas (single handedly bringing down the biggest footwear trend of the year) and met with three young finance influencers to talk about the Tory budget.
The influencers were clearly given a strict brief: each one was allowed to ask three questions with no follow ups, which let Sunak deliver his economic messaging without the interruptions or grilling he might expect from a journalist. Timothy Paul (@_timpaul), Abigail Foster (@elent_finance) and Beth Turbutt-Rogers (@budgetingmumofficial) are all in their twenties and have nearly 700,000 combined followers on Instagram, where they shared the interviews.
The format allowed the PM to make misleading, unchecked claims about how we’re all getting richer. He told Paul that the Tories are putting £900 back in the pocket of the average worker this year thanks to the National Insurance tax cut. This claim was found by the Institute for Fiscal Studies to be false, and when the Conservatives said the same thing on Twitter/X, it quickly received a correction, known as a Community Note. “Notes are not the place to debate tax policies but this specific claim that an average worker is £900 better off is measurably untrue,” it read.
We’ve made tough decisions on the economy while supporting people through global shocks like the pandemic.
— Conservatives (@Conservatives) April 5, 2024
Because of those decisions, we’re able to cut taxes.
From today, another tax cut will appear in your payslip. And it’ll put £900 back in the pocket of the average worker. pic.twitter.com/d1NfFdMK56
Sunak has received 25 Community Notes for his posts on X in the last year, which might explain why he has turned his attention to the wild west of Instagram reels. Through influencer interviews he can tap into a massive cache of young voters who care about their finances, without the pesky fact checkers getting in the way. Savvy!
