The Green party and Liberal Democrats both published their manifestos last week, featuring an array of images ranging from the tower housing Big Ben to sprawling countryside.
But both manifestos include images that appear not to be located in the UK, such as a hospital in South Africa and a wind farm in the Netherlands, FactCheck has found.
FactCheck also previously reported that the Reform UK party manifesto also appeared to feature images not located in the UK.
Multiple images from Nigel Farage’s party “Contract” feature locations that seem to not be in the UK, including a fishing vessel displaying two German flags in what appears to be German waters, and a family that appear to be in Slovenia.
We put this to the Reform Party and asked if the images were included in error. We also asked if they thought these could be misleading.
The Reform Party said: “Both are generic images, one an unidentifiable family, one a trawler. You know, we know, and anybody seeing our Contract will know that.”
This comes after an advert in support of the Conservative’s London mayoral candidate which featured scenes from New York instead of the capital was heavily criticised for being misleading, deleted and replaced with a video where the New York scenes had been cut.
So what do the Lib Dem and Green manifestos show?
South Africa
In the Green party manifesto, under the section titled “Building a Fairer, Healthier Country”, an image (right) of a hospital corridor is featured.
But this appears not to be an NHS hospital but in fact one located overseas. The photo on Unsplash – a website library of photos – has a location tag of “South Africa”.
And another image (left) featured in the party’s manifesto, under the section titled “Caring With Fairness, Compassion and Dignity” – which discusses social care in the UK – shows an elderly patient with a carer.
FactCheck contacted the photographer of this image – which is available on a few websites including photo library website Shutterstock – who told us the image was taken in South Africa.
Netherlands
On page 25 of the Lib Dems’ manifesto, in a section which discusses the
UK’s use of renewable energy, an image (right) of a wind farm features, but this appears to be Westermeerwind wind farm in the Netherlands.
A few similar images taken from different angles and published on Shutterstock include the metadata “dutch” and
“Netherlands”, alongside “offshore”, “wind” and “farm”. The photographer is also from the Netherlands.
Stock images
Although news organisations and publishers do routinely use “stock” or “archive” images to convey generic ideas, political parties have been criticised in the past for following the same approach with electoral content about the UK.
Both the Labour Party and Plaid Cymru manifestos appear to show UK scenes only, or don’t use stock images. While the Conservative manifesto doesn’t include any images at all. The Scottish National Party is due to publish its manifesto this week.
A Green Party spokesperson told FactCheck: “We used images throughout the manifesto mainly from our Shutterstock account looking to find images that represented the message of real hope and real change we were aiming to communicate.”
A Liberal Democrat spokesperson said: “Manifesto photos are for illustrative purposes only.”
(Image Credit: Liberal Democrats’ manifesto (Fokke Baarssen/Shutterstock) and Green party manifesto (Jacob Lund/Shutterstock) & (Hush Naidoo Jade Photography/Unsplash))
