Brexit Considerations

In the three years since the tremendously far-sighted people of Somerton and Frome prodded me into the spotlight by taking me as their MP, I’ve received tens of thousands of emails and hundreds of letters. I’ve met with hundreds of the country’s finest constituents at countless MP surgeries.

David Warburton MP

Your Member of Parliament for Somerton & Frome

11th October 2018

David says

If I were to ask you “life - what’s it all for?” you’d agree that would be a fairly big question. But though it might have been tackled for millennia by innumerable thinkers rather more qualified than me, I’m going to take a stab.

When Tory Health Minister Henry Willink first proposed the National Health Service in 1944 with the publication of his White Paper "A National Health Service", his idea immediately gathered cross-party support.

Alongside tens of thousands of others, my parents came to Britain in the early 1950s. They came with little, my father’s family settling in a Nissen hut on a former prisoner of war camp near Portsmouth.

Who amongst us can forget the winter floods of four and five years ago? In early 2014, the Environment Agency said 100 million cubic metres of water was covering 65 square kilometres of Somerset soil.

Last Friday, the curtain concealing the Syrian city of Raqqa was finally flung aside.  The devastated city was formally liberated by Syrian Democratic Forces, a coalition of militia factions, from the grip of Daesh, or Islamic State as the BBC still insists on calling them.

Believe it or not, the vast majority of those amongst us in the Palace of Westminster are in politics because – yes - they genuinely want to make some kind of positive impact on the condition of lives.

In 1963, the then Oxford student and theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking was given two years to live. He was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, that most callous and arbitrary of illnesses, which would gradually detach him from his body and organs, paralysing as it went.