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24 Ekim 2016 Pazartesi

MPs urge chancellor to honour leave campaign"s £350m NHS promise

Dozens of MPs have signed a joint letter, organised by a group that aims to hold leave campaigners to their pre-referendum promises, which calls on the government to uphold the most infamous Brexit promise of all – £350m more a week to be spent on the NHS.


The letter, signed by 41 MPs, mainly from Labour but also some Liberal Democrats and Caroline Lucas of the Greens, demands that the chancellor, Philip Hammond, make the pledge in his autumn statement a month from now.


The £350m pledge was a key element of the Vote Leave campaign’s promise to voters, billed as money that would be saved after leaving the EU which could instead go to health spending.


In the wake of the 23 June referendum many leading pro-Brexit figures began to distance themselves from the idea, a process highlighted in a new Vote Leave Watch video to accompany the letter.


Last month it emerged that a successor group to Vote Leave, Change Britain, had not included the pledge among its aims.


The letter, addressed to Hammond, noted that the chancellor’s speech to the Conservative party conference earlier this month said that “the message of the referendum result had been ‘received, loud and clear’ by the government”.


The letter continued: “We accept the verdict of the British people. Yet it is clear that, if this mandate is to mean anything, it must include the single most visible promise of the leave campaign – spending £350m more a week on the NHS.


“In just under a month you will present your first autumn statement. We are calling on you to commit to increase national NHS spending by £350m a week – that is £18.2bn a year – as soon as this money becomes available by leaving the European Union. This additional funding must be over and above the amount that is currently planned to be spent on the National Health Service.


“Anything else will be a betrayal of the wishes of the British people. We challenge you, when you stand up in the House of Commons on 23 November, to show us the money and commit to Vote Leave’s promise; or explain why you cannot, and why your cabinet colleagues so cynically misled the British people.”


Chuka Umunna, the Labour MP who chairs Vote Leave Watch, said the message to Hammond was that “this Brexit government will not be able to run away from the promises of Brexit campaigners”.


Umunna said: “He has a month to work out how the government are going to find the money to keep this promise. If he can’t his pro-leave colleagues will have to explain why they misled voters during the campaign and are now breaking their promises.”


The full letter and signatories


Dear Chancellor,


We believe in a Britain with an excellent, well-funded public sector that provides a world-class service to the British people, pays its hard-working staff well and treats them with respect.


This was the vision of Britain promised by your cabinet colleagues who campaigned for a leave vote in the EU referendum. Vote Leave promised that, if Britain left the EU, £350m a week extra would be spent on the NHS. They travelled the country in a bus which said: “We send the EU £350m a week, let’s fund our NHS instead.” In the press conference suite at their London headquarters, a large sign read: “Let’s give our NHS the £350m the EU takes every week.”


The foreign secretary, the secretary of state for international trade, the secretary of state for the environment, the secretary of state for transport and the secretary of state for international development all appeared in photo opportunities featuring these messages. They made a very clear promise to the British people, and it is clear that a very large number of people believed this promise.


In your speech to Conservative party conference earlier this month, you said that the message of the referendum result had been “received, loud and clear” by the government. Members of the government talk of the “mandate” from the voters for Brexit.


We accept the verdict of the British people. Yet it is clear that, if this mandate is to mean anything, it must include the single most visible promise of the leave campaign – spending £350m more a week on the NHS.



Chuka Ummuna, the Labour MP who chairs Vote Leave Watch:


Chuka Ummuna, the Labour MP who chairs Vote Leave Watch: ‘this Brexit government will not be able to run away from the promises of Brexit campaigners.’ Photograph: Jack Taylor/Getty Images

In just under a month, you will present your first autumn statement. We are calling on you to commit to increase national NHS spending by £350m a week – that is £18.2bn a year – as soon as this money becomes available by leaving the European Union. This additional funding must be over and above the amount that is currently planned to be spent on the National Health Service.


Anything else will be a betrayal of the wishes of the British people. We challenge you, when you stand up in the House of Commons on 23 November, to show us the money and commit to Vote Leave’s promise; or explain why you cannot, and why your cabinet colleagues so cynically misled the British people.


Yours sincerely,


Chuka Umunna, Chair of Vote Leave Watch


Tom Brake, Patron of Vote Leave Watch


Norman Lamb, Patron of Vote Leave Watch


Emma Reynolds, Patron of Vote Leave Watch


Rushanara Ali


Ian Austin


Adrian Bailey


Kevin Baron


Tom Blenkinsop


Ben Bradshaw


Dawn Butler


Vernon Coaker


Mary Creagh


Stella Creasy


Julie Elliott


Chris Evans


Mike Gapes


Lilian Greenwood


David Hanson


Carolyn Harris


Tristram Hunt


Graham Jones


Stephen Kinnock


Peter Kyle


Caroline Lucas


Holly Lynch


Seema Malhotra


Conor McGinn


Alison McGovern


Ian Murray


Melanie Onn


Toby Perkins


Bridget Philipson


Rachel Reeves


Gavin Shuker


Ruth Smeeth


Angela Smith


Owen Smith


Wes Streeting


Anna Turley


Phil Wilson


John Woodcock



MPs urge chancellor to honour leave campaign"s £350m NHS promise

30 Mayıs 2014 Cuma

The pioneering surgeon who healed guys scarred by war, a new monument created in his honour - and the impressive twist of fate that hyperlinks them

In the finish McIndoe and his team in West Sussex “fixed up” 649 servicemen – men who underwent such revolutionary treatment method that they rakishly dubbed themselves The Guinea Pig Club.


Their disfigurement meant the chance of getting shunned by sweethearts and buddies, their lives blighted. So McIndoe not only treated them, he also stood up for them. “He had enormous battles with the authorities,” says Montfort Bebb, now 86. “He stated, ‘You treat my boys effectively.’ He even had a keg of beer for them in the ward. He had to give them the odd dressing-down, they were young men – they did misbehave – but they loved him.”


Such devotion suggests that handful of guys more richly deserve being immortalised in bronze than Sir Archibald McIndoe. But by the time, two years in the past, that Jacquie Pinney, chief executive of the health care analysis charity Blond McIndoe, began a campaign to erect a statue to McIndoe, his name and popularity had faded from the public eye.


The charity was founded in 1961 by the industrialist Neville Blond, who lived close to East Grinstead and noticed McIndoe’s operate there first-hand. He admired how McIndoe had taken present, primitive, plastic-surgical treatment tactics and pioneered new techniques that transformed not only the lives of his sufferers, but also the total area of reconstructive surgery.


But despite McIndoe’s achievements, there have been no statues or monuments to his honour, even in his native New Zealand. “There was practically nothing,” says Pinney. “I felt it was long overdue.”


Hence when she known as Martin Jennings, the acclaimed sculptor of the considerably-loved John Betjeman statue in St Pancras station, she was worried that he would not know who McIndoe was: “I assumed he would consider, ‘Who are these weird folks calling from East Grinstead?’”


When she got by way of to him, he went quiet on the line, apparently confirming her worst fears. She require not have anxious. “It was incredible,” says Jennings now. “She imagined that I would by no means have heard of McIndoe. But in truth I knew all about him.”


Above the program of the ensuing conversation, Martin Jennings relevant how his father, Michael, had been a tank commander in the war. On the afternoon of October 17 1944, with the Allies bearing down on the Maas canal, he was leading a troop of four tanks from the 15/19 King’s Royal Hussars on a push by means of heavily fortified German positions east of Eindhoven, in the Netherlands.


All of a sudden his Cromwell tank was hit by a shell. The driver was wounded but, determined to press on, an undaunted Jennings switched to another tank and continued the advance. He was significantly less lucky second time round. The shell that hit his commandeered tank killed its driver. As the armoured automobile erupted into flames, Jennings himself was badly burned. He had small time to reflect on his issue.


“In his diary he recorded that the Germans have been ‘coming on a bit’,” says his son. “I consider that’s a euphemism for massive numbers of them trying to kill him.”


Below hefty machine-gun fire, he produced it back to his personal lines. From there he was evacuated to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, where his head and his hands were completely bound in bandages. He was 23.


His sisters visited and fed him grapes by way of a mouth‑hole in the wrappings. But he also acquired one more visitor – Archie McIndoe, who was on one of his typical excursions of the nation to see if there had been sufferers that he may well be capable to assist.


Michael Jennings was unusual for a Guinea Pig, in that he was not an airman. None the much less, he was transferred to East Grinstead and, over the course of the next two many years, underwent a host of skin grafts and reconstructive procedures at the hands of McIndoe and his fellow surgeon, Percy Jayes.


At the outset, Michael Jennings’s morale could hardly have been reduce. His sisters found him staring into a mirror, repeating: “I’m burned to a crisp. I’m burned to a crisp.”


But, as his son notes, “McIndoe had this outstanding capacity to transfer his self confidence to his patients.”


Jack Perry can don’t forget that golden touch: “He sat on my bed and kindly spoke to me. He explained: ‘I see you play a whole lot of sport. Properly, you are going to perform once again. Perhaps not as well, but you definitely will play.’”


That ability to lift spirits was an important component of the McIndoe treatment. “His sufferers, like my father, have been such younger males,” says Martin Jennings. “They have been hoping to get married, have young children and a normal daily life. Out of the blue they have been plunged into the prospect of a existence of passivity and victimhood. But McIndoe was so upbeat. His ethos was that these horrible injuries did not mean that their lives have been over.”


Michael Jennings was 1 of individuals who, with McIndoe’s support, refused to accept that his daily life was more than. In 1952, he received married, and he and his wife had 11 young children.


These days, Martin Jennings describes his loved ones connection and the call from Jacquie Pinney as “an astonishing coincidence”. She had discovered in the sculptor a man who had lengthy nursed the concept of producing a monument to the guy who had cared for his father and overseen “significant improvement to the decrease half of his encounter – to his nose, mouth, lips”.


Certainly it is a hardly a stretch to recommend that with out McIndoe, Michael Jennings may in no way have married, and his sculptor son may possibly never have been born.


It has taken two years considering that that 2012 telephone contact for the project to come to fruition. On one particular research journey to East Grinstead, Jennings asked for data from the war. There he turned up a file featuring a familiar face. For 10 many years right after he was burned, Michael Jennings refused to be photographed. But there, in the hospital files, have been photos from that lost decade that McIndoe had taken to plan and perform his operations.


“That was really moving,” says Jennings. “I was seeking at photos of my father, and he was the exact same age in the pictures as my very own sons have been in true lifestyle. I discovered myself feeling a sense of paternal protectiveness to my own father. That was very much McIndoe’s spirit. He was a father to these guys. This is a story of fathers and sons.”


With that exact same protective spirit, McIndoe would send the men below his care into East Grinstead, to stroll the town, drink in the pubs, attend events – just like other younger guys. And the folks of East Grinstead, to their immense credit, learned to welcome these disfigured males in uniform. Now it is identified as “the town that did not stare”.


Jennings’s McIndoe memorial is, as a consequence, an arrangement of two somewhat bigger than life-size figures. Seated is a airman, his burned hands clawed collectively, his scarred encounter turned to 1 side. Standing behind him, resting a reassuring hand on every single shoulder, is the figure of McIndoe.


They are framed by a stone bench. “When the nearby individuals sit on that lengthy curved seat, they comprehensive the monument,” says Jennings. “This is a tribute to Archie McIndoe and the Guinea Pigs, but it is also a tribute to the individuals of East Grinstead.”


Michael Jennings, like numerous of the Guinea Pigs, went on to outlive by far the man who had so helped him. He died in 2002, aged 82, after a lengthy submit-war profession as a instructor. He too, will live on in the memorial. Though the figure of the airman is not based on any a single guy, Martin Jennings modelled the burned hands on individuals of his father.


The result, says Montfort Bebb, would have enormously pleased her very own father, Archie McIndoe. Not that he subscribed to theories of “greatness”.


“He mentioned that greatness is just challenging work – attention to detail and a lot of hard perform. He possibly worked himself to death. But he by no means talked about his very own health. He was just devoted to medicine and patching up these poor boys.”


Go to mcindoememorial.com to make a donation



The pioneering surgeon who healed guys scarred by war, a new monument created in his honour - and the impressive twist of fate that hyperlinks them

1000"s attend vigil in honour of cancer campaigner Stephen Sutton

Stephen Sutton vigil

Stephen Sutton’s efforts assisted increase above £4m for the fight against cancer. Photograph: Joe Giddens/PA




A lot more than ten,000 people took part in a vigil in honour of Stephen Sutton, the teenage cancer campaigner whose achievements have been remembered on Friday at a memorial support prior to he was laid to rest at a personal funeral.


The services, held to mark the finish of two days’ thanksgiving for the lifestyle of the 19-12 months-old who helped raise £4m in the fight towards cancer just before he succumbed to a number of tumours on 14 Might, was attended by friends and loved ones which includes his mom Jane, and older brother Chris.


Tributes have been also paid on social media. Stephen was a keen consumer of Twitter which said that eleven,000 tweets had been sent with the hashtag #ThumbsUpForStephen.


1000′s filed past his white coffin over two days as it lay in area of honour within Lichfield Cathedral, Staffordshire, in what Adrian Dorber, dean of Lichfield, named a phenomenal show of human unity for a man who had “turn into everybody’s favourite son”.


Among the mourners was comedian Jason Manford, who met Stephen in hospital, and was between a host of celebrities who praised the young man’s courage in residing with terminal condition.


Earlier, about 400 men and women had also offered a thumbs-up to the memory of Sutton.


Dorber mentioned Stephen’s memory had energised people, the two youthful and old, cancer survivors and sufferers, who had queued to grieve the loss of the teenager, from Burntwood, in Staffordshire.


He explained the enduring lesson of Stephen, diagnosed with bowel cancer at 15, was “to dwell not as a victim but as a free of charge younger man or woman”, including his inspiration was to “offer an substitute to the bleak, indicate see, we often have of daily life”.


Stephen’s former headteacher, Stuart Jones, of Chase Terrace Engineering College, explained there was a collective pride more than the fact Stephen had studied there. “It is hard to comprehend how he found the courage, determination and vitality to achieve what he did in his final couple of years,” he said.


These achievements, brought with each other in a bucket list, incorporated Sutton urging Jones to join him in a 15,000ft skydive. “I hated it, as I anticipated, but am genuinely glad I did it,” he stated. “His spirit tends to make us want to be bolder and braver.”


Siobhan Dunn, chief executive of the Teenage Cancer Believe in, explained: “The big difference Stephen has produced has been immeasurable.” She stated the charity would commit the donations supporting and building the trust’s 22 Uk units, outreach nursing teams and youth assistance staff.


“Younger men and women ought to not be defined by their cancer,” she mentioned, including that thecharity would carry on to perform under Stephen’s ethos that “even though he could have had cancer, cancer did not have him”.


Dunn mentioned: “How fitting it is a young individual with cancer proved the catalyst to supporting a lot of far more younger men and women with cancer, now and in the future.”


Outside, as his coffin emerged from the cathedral the crowd of one,200 again clapped for a ultimate time as 19 balloons have been launched by his mother and brother, prior to a a lot greater number had been allow loose to cheers and musical backing by the Pandemonium Drummers, who had performed for the London 2012 Olympic Video games.




1000"s attend vigil in honour of cancer campaigner Stephen Sutton