Europe

PM refuses to look at picture of boy forced to sleep on hospital floor

10/12/2019

By Peter Walker
Dec. 9, 2019

Boris Johnson has been accused of not caring after he repeatedly refused during a TV interview to look at a photo of a four-year-old boy forced to sleep on the floor at an overcrowded A&E unit, before pocketing the reporter’s phone on which he was being shown the picture.
In an ITV interview during a campaign visit to a factory in Sunderland, the prime minister was challenged about the plight of Jack Williment-Barr, who was pictured sleeping under coats on a hospital floor in Leeds as he waited for a bed, despite having suspected pneumonia.
Johnson refused to look at the photo and, out of camera shot, eventually took the phone from the reporter and put it in his own pocket. Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, responded by tweeting a video of the exchange with the message: “He just doesn’t care.”

Editorial: Privatisation is at the heart of our NHS’s problems – only Labour will root it out

December 9, 2019
OUR flustered Prime Minister shoving a reporter’s phone into his own pocket rather than look at a photo of a four-year-old forced to wait for treatment lying on a hospital floor tells you all you need to know about Boris Johnson’s indifference to the NHS crisis.
As the campaign enters its closing stretch, attention is again focusing on a health service groaning under years of real-terms cuts, beset by chronic understaffing and riddled with privatisation thanks to the Tory-Lib Dem Health and Social Care Act of 2012.
Labour has already exposed hundreds of pages documenting talks held between British and US representatives on a future trade deal, indicating that however often the Tories claim the NHS is “off the table” the opposite is true.
Washington’s determination to impose stricter patent law could multiply the cost of medicines many times over; and as former Labour adviser James Meadway has explained, US companies are also after access to NHS data — which could shift control of our private medical records abroad and force the NHS to pay for use of its own data for research and development.