As elections approach, voters are forced to navigate a swamp of spin, distortion, and inaccessible data.
Britain does not suffer from a shortage of opinion. It suffers from a shortage of clarity. That might sound odd at a time when every event is instantly met with commentary, analysis, outrage, and spin, but that is precisely the point. Before the facts have even had a chance to breathe, every public question is buried beneath a pile of takes. Politicians massage the truth, campaigners moralise, institutions retreat into jargon and the public is left to wade through a swamp of narratives, distortions, and half-truths.
That, in large part, is why I have joined the Great British Think Tank (GBTT).
I didn’t join because Britain needs another political think tank, vanity platform, or outfit that starts with the conclusion and then looks for a statistic to fit the narrative. I joined because I am surer than ever that one of this country’s biggest problems is that too much important information is either politically filtered, bureaucratically hidden, or presented in a way that makes it almost impossible for people to decipher. To me, that is wrong and undemocratic.
This matters more when elections are near. On Thursday 7 May 2026, voters will go to the polls in elections taking place across the UK, including local government elections, Scottish Parliament elections, Senedd Cymru elections, and mayoral elections in England. People are being asked to choose how they want to be governed. They shouldn’t have to do it with selective or misleading data.
GBTT is an independent, data-driven think tank and media platform. It is editorially independent and not affiliated with any political party. Its figures are sourced from official public bodies including the ONS, OBR, HMRC, and DWP. Its mission is to arm the public, especially the young, with the facts about how the government spends — and misspends — their taxes. That seems necessary to me. There has been no shortage of performance politics over the years. What we haven’t had is the patient presentation of clear, useful, and raw evidence.
Some commentators will question the decision for many of the team to remain private. That is understandable. We live in a culture that places absurd weight on profile, branding and public performance. If a project is not fronted by personalities, some assume there must be something suspect about it. I disagree. This was a deliberate decision, and a sensible one. It protects professional roles and preserves independence. It allows people to gather and present granular data without fear or favour. In a country where reputational pressure can operate quietly but effectively, that matters.
Regardless, the important thing here is not personality. It is substance.
We care too much about who is talking and not enough about whether what they are saying is true. In modern Britain, arguments too often start with a tribe, a face, a vibe, or a set of secret loyalties. The facts only come later, if at all. We shouldn’t have time for that. What matters is that the data is correct, clear, and comes from a reliable source.
Perhaps that sounds obvious. It is not. Much of British public life now works in reverse. First comes the conclusion. Then the slogan. Then the selective deployment of evidence to furnish it with retrospective authority. I have spent enough of my life in markets and economics to know how dangerous that is. When facts become subordinate to narrative, serious policy becomes much harder and public trust corrodes a little further.
We can already see the damage. Trust in politicians is threadbare: the Ipsos’s Veracity Index 2025 found that only 9 per cent of the public trust politicians generally to tell the truth, while only 14 per cent say the same of government ministers.
Nor is mistrust confined to politics. The Office for Statistics Regulation said in late 2025 that the ONS needed to take urgent action to rebuild trust in its core economic statistics. That followed concerns about survey response rates, data quality and wider confidence in some key measures. That should worry anyone who cares about serious government. If trust in politicians is weak and confidence in core official statistics is also under pressure, the room for manipulation widens. In those circumstances, the case for clear, transparent, understandable data becomes stronger still.
That is why the work of GBTT is so important. A public that can see and understand the numbers clearly is harder to mislead. This matters, particularly in local elections. Westminster has a habit of treating local government as a kind of administrative sideshow, but that is not how it is experienced by the people who live under it. Council tax, planning, roads, housing, local services, basic competence – these things shape daily life more directly than many grand speeches from the centre. If voters are to form serious judgements about those who govern them, they need facts they can actually use.
We have become comfortable with mediocre politicians and managed obfuscation. Vast amounts of information are technically public, yet functionally hidden — buried in PDFs, wrapped in bureaucratic language, scattered across multiple agencies, or presented in ways that only specialists can easily decode. Availability is mistaken for accessibility. If the public cannot readily access or understand the numbers, then what’s their use?
The team behind GBTT do not think that is good enough. Not in a country where growth and productivity have been persistently weak, GDP per head remains only modestly above its pre-pandemic level, public debt is still forecast to hover around 95 per cent of GDP, and welfare spending is forecast at £333.7 billion in 2025-26.
Britain needs fewer comforting lies and more hard edges. It needs less sentimentality about past policies and more honesty about the need for change. Above all, it needs public information placed before as broad and diverse an audience as possible in a form that is intelligible, testable and real.
The electorate needs institutions, however modest, that are prepared to put the facts first. They need raw data, presented clearly and without political spin, so that everyone can make informed decisions for themselves. After all, that is part of the basic machinery of a free society. And in the weeks before 7 May, it is hard to think of anything more necessary.
