300 children from Gaza to be brought to the UK for free specialist NHS care

[Fragmentedbrain]

According to the Sunday Times. That's nearly as many beds as there are in Great Ormond Street, where the average waiting time for paediatric surgery is 15 weeks (which is fairly typical nationwide).

Why is it mysteriously possible for government to deliver these showy, headline-grabbing measures (I know we already knew it could happen from COVID policy) but not to just make systems work well in an ordinary way?

https://www.itv.com/news/2025-08-03/hundreds-of-children-from-gaza-to-be-brought-to-uk-for-medical-treatment

If you support Israel’s genocide you don’t have the right to whinge about the consequences

Statement in the Commons regarding Sudan. Plenty more recent statements. We are supporting existing refugees in South Sudan and Chad.

https://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=2024-04-22c.653.0

Jordan has been doing it for a while:

www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cg5v2rjp84ro.amp

Do you genuinely give a shit about the answer to that question?
nope

300 desperately unwell kids being treated in the UK by a charity, media whips up a storm to feed into anti immigration rhetoric

meanwhile-https://www.declassifieduk.org/how-britain-is-wasting-its-defence-budget/
• Blair’s Labour government spent more than £6 billion on two of the largest ships built for the Royal Navy – the aircraft carriers, Queen Elizabeth and Prince of Wales, described to me by Lord Richards, a former chief of defence staff as “behemoths…unaffordable vulnerable metal cans”. They have been plagued by serious mechanical problems and the navy has not sufficient personnel to crew them.
• It is still unclear how many F-35 fighter jets the MoD will buy for the aircraft carriers or the RAF as part of an aircraft project originally estimated to cost more than £13bn over 30 years. Declassified has reported how Britain’s role making components for the Lockheed Martin aircraft has further tied the country to the US and implicated the country in the bombing of Gaza.
• A fleet of new Nimrod reconnaissance aircraft was scrapped in the 2010 Defence and Security Review because of delays and cost overruns, wasting £4bn of public money and leaving a significant capability gap threatening Britain’s ability to track potentially hostile ships and submarines around the coast, including the Trident base at Faslane in Scotland.
• A new radio system for the army, called Bowman, cost £2.5bn. It was 25 years late and is to be abandoned.
• The navy described its new fleet of Type 45 Daring class destroyers as ‘state of the art’ vessels. Their Rolls-Royce engines could not cope with the energy consumed by the ships, which broke down with catastrophic propulsion and electrical failures. The destroyer programme was two years’ late and £1.5bn over budget. In early 2024, five of the navy’s six Type 45 destroyers, all less than 15 years old, were being maintained in dock. “We have £1bn destroyers trying to sort out pirates in a little dhow with RPGs (rocket propelled grenades) costing $50”, said Richards, who added that “there’s a growing mismatch between the reality and the aspirational”.
• £5.5bn has been spent developing Ajax, an armoured vehicle with problems including noise and vibration that injured soldiers testing the vehicles. It is reported that they will not be ready until the end of the decade, more than a decade late.
• The MoD was more than £4bn worse off selling married quarters, which it had to rent later from a private company, a disgrace the Commons defence committee recently referred to in an excoriating report.
The NAO in 2023 reported a £16.9bn black hole in Britain’s defence equipment programme. For the second successive year the MoD will not publish an annual report on the state of its equipment programme, its top officials told the Commons defence committee at a meeting on 17 December.
Consequently, the NAO has not been able to produce its own assessment of the government’s defence procurement plans. MPs on the defence committee said the MoD’s increasing secrecy raised a serious “problem of accountability”.
We have previously noted that Britain’s Trident nuclear weapons are neither independent nor a credible deterrent. Yet Trident is predicted to cost a total of more than £200bn over a 30 year lifespan. The MoD has not challenged the figure and has never given any of its own estimates in public.

This.

Not read FT but the bill can be/SHOULD be sent to Israel? No?

Being completely unemotive about it, apart from it being absolutely fine for health professionals to volunteer their time to help these children, it's also going to benefit members of the team who have not had experience of treating the sort of injuries these children have combined with severe malnutrition - crush injuries, explosives injuries, burns, bullet wounds, traumatic amputations, that sort of thing. If something awful happens to a child who has always lived here, such as a massive accident, it's got to be better for their outcomes to have a surgeon who has dealt with injuries of a similar nature.

Send it to hamas...that's their "government" isn't it?

Nigeria isn't undergoing a famine and is a pretty stable African country. Obviously there's poverty but there's lots of poverty in the UK. Sudan has received lots of support (not enough) but even a few months ago Lammy organised a summit in London focusing on getting better aid and a long-term plan for stability in Sudan.

Interesting to see the moving goalposts the last couple of months:

Nobody is dying of starvation and widespread apocalyptic bombing of infrastructure in Gaza, it’s all Hamas lies >>
Okay loads of civlians are dying but it’s Hamas fault not Israel >>
Okay it is Israel’s fault and they’re doing it on purpose - but they’re not the only evil government in the world! Why are you all so obsessed!?

Nigeria isn't undergoing a famine

Nor is Gaza

If the NHS cannot afford to pay for sick children, they need to stop wasting money on treating obese, smoking, alcoholic, sendentary adults for their lifestyle choices.

Unless you have cost the NHS zero money because you are a fat, lazy, sunburned, pissed, skiing, smoking burden on NHS funds, you have no stake in denying any child NHS funding.

Well exactly. They are some of the richest countries in the world yet there is no pressure for them to step in.

This.

Money / resources to help kids in a showy way. No money to help dying people stuck in Ambulances outside A&E. We always seem to be able to help everyone else.

They don't need to be put under pressure to step in - they've already done it.

Sorry but you're behind the times. This is funded by British taxpayers. And you are part of the problem with society now. You've decided you want a fight about how kind you are and how evil someone else (me on this occasion) is and you've shut your brain down.

You'd rather just sit colouring in your wee Palestine flags for your window than think about boring domestic policy, I get it.

This of course is why the NHS won't improve day to day. There is money. But people like you only think about the Shiny Current Thing so politicians won't invest in the basics.

So you think the NHS should be responsible for every sick child in the world?

Really? How is this happening then? There are kids eating sand.

"@alert issued by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) says there is mounting evidence that widespread starvation, malnutrition and disease are driving a rise in hunger-related deaths among the 2.1 million Palestinians there.

"Latest data indicates that famine thresholds have been reached for food consumption in most of the Gaza Strip and for acute malnutrition in Gaza City," it adds."

It's ok, @Comedycook said there is no famine nothing to see here

This is being funded outside the NHS.

A famine has not been officially declared though.

Oh, that’s all right then. 🙄