BBC Verify is in retreat. Last June the Beeb launched the ‘Verify Live blog’ as part of its push for ‘greater transparency’. But already the blog has gone quiet. This morning the Times reported that Verify’s executive editor has emailed staff to announce that the blog had been ‘put on pause for the last few weeks’ and would not be restarted. Verify lives on in a neutered form within the wider BBC News website.

Mourning its loss, the Reality Check team took a look at Verify’s greatest hits…

Race claims

Perhaps their most inflammatory mistake was to state, wrongly, that during the disturbances around the country in the wake of the Southport stabbings, a group of ‘angry white men’ in Hull had ‘surrounded and attacked a car with men of Asian heritage inside’. The video they cited as evidence for this claim showed the men inside the car – but Verify had to wait for Humberside police to point out to them that they were in fact Eastern European before correcting the article.

Given the scale of destruction and violence which followed the Southport atrocity, it is a small miracle that nobody was murdered in the disturbances. Rapidly disseminating false narratives of interethnic violence are exactly what BBC Verify should have been stopping, not spreading.

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