Starmer urged to engage with Scotland over Gaza evacuations
First Minister John Swinney wrote to Sir Keir Starmer earlier this month, saying Scotland 'stands ready' to receive some of the 2,000 children from Gaza injured as a result of the Israeli bombardment of the territory, to be treated in the NHS.
But Mr Swinney claims to have received no response from the Prime Minister.
In a statement to the PA news agency, Mr Swinney said: 'It is deeply saddening that so far the UK Government has refused to even enter into a dialogue about medical evacuations for children in Gaza who, without proper medical attention, will be left to die.
'That is the frank reality of life in Gaza under Israeli bombardment and blockade.
'The healthcare system in Gaza is on the brink of total collapse, with surgeons working day and night under artillery fire, with inadequate supplies and often no electricity.
'We know that many hospitals have been targeted and decimated by the IDF (Israel Defence Forces).'
The First Minister added that Scotland is prepared 'to do what is required to save the lives of as many of these kids as we can'.
His initial call came after a meeting with children's charity Unicef, prompting him to declare a 'race against time' to help children in need of urgent medical care.
'But we can't do so without the support of the Labour Government to get the children through the UK visa system and into Scotland,' he said.
'The suffering, torment and killing of the people of Gaza has gone on for far too long.
'I urge the Prime Minister to urgently engage with the Scottish Government on this issue so we can save as many young lives as we can.'
A spokeswoman for the UK Government said: 'Since the start of the conflict, UK support has provided essential healthcare to over 430,000 people in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
'We have helped several children with complex paediatric conditions access privately funded medical care in the UK, supporting an initiative by Project Pure Hope.
'We have been clear the situation in Gaza is intolerable and that there must be an immediate ceasefire.
'We urge Israel to let vital humanitarian aid in and allow Gazans to receive urgent healthcare, including allowing the sick and wounded to temporarily leave the Gaza Strip to receive treatment.'
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The Independent
28 minutes ago
- The Independent
David Lammy's condemnation of the atrocities in Gaza is an important breakthrough
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The Sun
29 minutes ago
- The Sun
We are taking REAL steps to tackle illegal migration that WILL deliver results & ensure fairness for Brits
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The Sun
29 minutes ago
- The Sun
Angry mums & dads protesting about immigration are NOT extremists – leftie elite who forced this experiment upon us are
IF YOU want a sense of the rapidly deteriorating and darkening mood in Britain right now, just look at what's been happening in towns outside London recently. On Monday night in Diss, Norfolk, protesters gathered outside an asylum-seeker hotel chanting, 'We want our country back'. 6 6 6 The previous Saturday in Dover, locals held a protest on the seafront against the spiralling number of small boats crossing the Channel. And Epping, Essex, has witnessed several larger protests after an illegal immigrant from Ethiopia, who recently arrived on a small boat, allegedly sexually assaulted a young local girl. The establishment is already falling over itself to dismiss the protests as 'far-right' and 'extremist'. But I would put it to you they reflect something else entirely. 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They can be found in the very deliberate and very irresponsible policies in Westminster that are pushing our once great country into managed decline, if not towards total collapse. Look at what we learned about Britain in the past seven days alone. Our politicians have been secretly importing thousands of Afghans into the country while using controversial laws to gag our media and keep the truth hidden from the public, who will now have to pay billions of pounds in costs for this scandal. The very same politicians, in other words, who ever since the Southport atrocity have berated the British people for suffering from 'misinformation' while, at the very same time, openly misinforming their own people. Then we learned the state can, when it wants to, suddenly find more than 2,000 homes for the Afghan migrants while thousands of our own military veterans remain homeless and many more British families remain at risk of homelessness. If our politicians can suddenly find a solution to this problem, many hard-working Brits will have wondered this week why they can't find similar solutions to the problems affecting British people. At the same time, we also learned we are being forced to pay not only £15billion over the next decade on hotel and accommodation costs for the illegal small boat migrants. We are also stumping up some £12billion a year in Universal Credit welfare payments for up to 1.3million foreigners, more than half of whom are not even working. And all this amid what is the worst cost-of-living crisis since the Second World War. How is this fair or right, many will also have asked this week? Even worse, we only learned about these shocking costs because independent campaigners forced the state to tell us about them, after submitting freedom of information requests. Until they did this, the state clearly did not want us to know about these costs. Nor, by the way, did the state want you to know that foreign nationals, like the Syrian migrant who repeatedly raped a 12-year-old girl in Birmingham, are more than three times as likely as British nationals to commit rape and sexual assault, with Eritreans and Afghans topping the list of the most likely offenders. That information, too, had to be forced out of the state. Then we learned the establishment in this country somehow thinks it's appropriate, after the truly awful rape gang scandal, to give an MBE to a Muslim man who called on his fellow Muslims to boycott authorities over that same rape gang scandal. Muhbeen Hussain was given the prestigious honour for 'services to cohesion' despite video footage circulating online showing him openly calling for Muslims to boycott state institutions they perceive to be unfairly targeting their communities. Is this really the kind of message the UK state wants to send? That if you organise a boycott of our public institutions, in the name of religion, you will be rewarded? 6 6 And then we were given the hideous sight of Labour MP Jess Phillips once again appearing on national media to try to downplay the now unavoidable fact we have a specific problem with rape gang activity in Pakistani-Muslim communities. That is something that is perfectly obvious to most people in this country but which the Labour Party, which relies heavily on Muslims for votes, continues to obfuscate and downplay. When the Labour minister was asked about this problem, Phillips displayed the exact same mentality that enabled the rape gangs to begin with: denial. While she dodged the question and blabbered about 'all men', reflecting the same bias that led middle-class #MeToo liberal feminists to say nothing at all about the rape gangs, the British people were reminded yet again about the fact that Labour just do not get it — they refuse to acknowledge the truth. Then, as if to hammer home the point, the British people learned about the truly shocking case of Courtney Wright, a British schoolgirl who had been sent home by her school after choosing to wear a Spice Girls -style Union Jack dress to the school's 'culture day'. And as The Sun reports today, dozens of pupils were put into isolation at a second school for sporting Union Jacks on another so-called 'culture day'. Far from isolated incidents, these are just the latest examples of what I call 'two-tier multiculturalism' — a regime that encourages every minority group to protect and promote their identities while telling the British majority they cannot have an identity of their own. Tear up the social fabric From Epping to Dover, the reason why so many Brits are utterly fed-up is not only because of the shocking sight of more than 170,000 illegal migrants flooding into their country on small boats but because they can also sense how their very identity as British people is being eroded and deconstructed in the name of celebrating a bland, globalist, meaningless 'diversity'. If the only thing that defines your identity is that you celebrate other people then it is the same as saying you have no identity of your own. Yet as every British person knows in their heart to be true, there is something remarkably special, unique, and distinctive about coming from these islands — no matter how much politicians deny it. Is all this chaos and carnage behind why so many are now peacefully protesting what is happening to their local communities and country? Is it not true that a very large majority of people in this country, like those people in Epping, want the very opposite of what their hapless leaders are imposing on them from above — masses of uncontrolled, unvetted migration that is making us less safe? What, I ask again, did our politicians and the state really expect? Because, as I say, I'd suggest to you that the real extremists in Britain are not the mums, dads, and grandparents who are peacefully protesting the transformation of the country. No. The real extremists are all those politicians and state bureaucrats who think it is somehow acceptable or justifiable to impose this radical experiment — and that's exactly what it is, an experiment — on a people who never asked for it, nor ever voted for it. The real extremists are the elite minority who are using their power to impose their will and tear up the social fabric that has long held this country together. It is the ruling class in this country, far more than the British people, who are responsible for the latest scenes in Epping, Dover, and Norfolk, and may soon be responsible for many more scenes to come if they do not change course and listen to the darkening mood out there in the country. 6
