This round-up of claims has been compiled by Full Fact, the UK’s independent fact checking charity which works to give people access to reliable information they can trust.
The Government is not spending an ‘extra £270 billion’ on defence
Ahead of the publication of the defence investment plan this week, several media reports quoted a spokesperson for the Government as saying that it is spending “an extra £270 billion” on defence over this Parliament.
We have not been able to confirm where this quote originated or who made the claim—we asked both the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and Number 10 about it, and did not hear back. But it is not correct.
As we explained earlier this year after the Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said something similar, £270 billion was roughly the MoD’s total projected spend for the years 2025/26 to 2028/29, as set out in the 2025 spending review. It does not represent the combined extra spending planned over this period.
Defence minister Luke Pollard confirmed this in February when he said £270 billion “is the total of the Ministry of Defence’s budget from financial year 2025/26 to 2028/29”. Adding together the MoD’s planned spends in last year’s spending review for each of these years gives a figure of £272.2 billion.
Since we saw this claim earlier this week however, the Government has published the defence investment plan, so the figures have changed again.
On Tuesday Sir Keir announced there would be a further £15 billion increase to defence spending over the next four years (up to 2029/30). Much of that £15 billion is due to be spent between 2026/27 and 2028/29, so that means that total spending from 2025/26 to 2028/29 is now set to be higher than the original figure of £270 billion.
Fake video of naval officer discussing migrant Channel crossings
A video circulating on social media which appears to show a naval officer telling an interviewer that small boat crossings of the English Channel are a violation of British sovereignty is fake.
The clip, which has had hundreds of comments and thousands of reactions on Facebook, shows a man in what looks like a white dress uniform speaking into a microphone in front of a ship flying the Union flag.
He states: “Illegal immigration across the English Channel is a direct violation of British sovereign waters. Our primary military duty is to defend the realm, but these undocumented crossings are challenging that control every single day.”
Many of the accounts we saw commenting on the video appeared to take it at face value, but it is not real footage—it was created using artificial intelligence.
We found the video contains SynthID, an invisible watermark added to content made with either Google or OpenAI’s tools. And there are also some visual clues that it was generated with AI, such as objects in the background glitching and morphing.
Before engaging with content like this that you come across online, it is important to consider whether it comes from a trustworthy and verifiable source. Full Fact’s misinformation toolkit contains tips on how to do this, as does their guide to spotting AI fakes.
