Gammon Verify 🐖✅: Is the UK "as strong as ever 🇬🇧"?

By Charlotte Gill, Gammon Verify disinformation and social media correspondent

“999 Gammon Emergency”.

You probably imagine we hear these alerts often at Gammon Verify 🐖✅, where lies are like grenades, exploding every second against the hardened walls of our Truth Lab.

Well, not on this occasion… this time I had a premonition of disinformation on the horizon.

As a certified disinformationist, I try not to pay attention to a hunch - “gut instinct” as the muggles call it.

It goes against everything I learnt when I gained my Black Belt in Lie Fighting.

But somehow last night I knew that the truth was under siege. I woke up in a sweat, launching towards my computer, and then my social media account - where I have 30,000 followers and counting. I must have felt a bit like Cassandra did when she warned the Greeks that the Trojans were in a horse, ready to destroy Athens and the other metropolises of feta production.

Then I saw it: the Conservatives social media account. It read:

“Don’t let the doomsters and the naysayers trick you into talking down our country. The UK is as strong as ever”.

Although the post had 538 likes, indicating that 538 people and/ or bots agreed with it, it still wasn’t clear that the Conservatives had verified their claims - conducting the sort of tests that are carried out regularly at Gammon Verify’s Truth Lab, and should only be done by experts on reality.

Wading into such claims without specialist guidance puts the Prime Minister at risk of a type of disinformation more dangerous than misgendering a trans woman on her period.

Was it right to claim “the UK is as strong as ever?”

To work out the veracity of the Conservatives’ claims, our expert team conducted three tests.

Physical strength

First of all, we took the Conservative Party’s sentence quite literally. If every UK citizen was required to have an arm wrestle with someone in a comparative country - say, France, because it’s near - would they win?

For this, Gammon Verify invited a specialist body builder into the Truth Lab for the day, who took into account factors like the average muscle strength of a UK citizen compared to the rest of Europe.

My average was not taken into the norm because of my intense strength (physically and mentally), part of why I qualified so highly as a disinformationist. However, the rest of the Truth Team’s strength was fed into the muscle machine.

Soon, the results were out. The body builder concluded that the UK is, in fact, too obese on aggregate to win such an arm wrestle, even when compared to the US.

Test one = fail ⛔

The economy

You don’t have to be good at numbers to understand the following analysis, so feel free to let out a sigh of relief.

Luckily, the team at Gammon Verify are well versed in breaking down data to people who might have done intermediate maths at GCSE Level.

The second big test of whether the UK is as strong as ever is how well it is doing economically.

Again, don’t get put off by the big words. What we’re interested in is whether money is going around the UK in a nice orderly fashion, rather like when you order a Nando’s meal and get it a few minutes later (I never eat at Nando’s but know many a muggle has frequented its premises).

Having combed through some of the most complex data in the world, Gammon Verify can provide a summary of the UK’s economic outlook.

Trigger Warning

The following scenes may cause emotional harm.

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Gammon Verify found that UK wage growth expectations fall to 2-year low. To put it simply, the UK is not doing well. The body builder told us that even the joint strength of two UK citizens in an armwrestle would not be strong enough to pull us back from the brink - even when facing France where they eat snails.

Test two = fail ⛔

Some more maths

We don’t want to bombard you with numbers at Gammon Verify - so to put it simply: because 2/3 constitutes a majority, we do not need to do any more tests to see if the Conservatives are guilty of dangerous disinformation.

Two strikes is enough to prove that the UK is not “as strong as ever” ⛔⛔, and that the Conservatives are guilty of porkie proliferation.

Tough words - but better to know the truth than to scorch in a sunset of lies.

Plenty of disinformation is currently circulating about this matter. We urge muggles to stay vigilant and only check in with Gammon Verify.