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.
Over 1 million servicemen and women from Britain and the Commonwealth were lost or killed during the First World War. That is a difficult number to really get to grips with, a figure so large that it can become an abstraction. The actual figure is 1,115,471.
Meeting members of the Frome Dementia Action Alliance to support their plans for the recently relaunched branch in Frome. With from right to left - Sarah Goff, chair of the Frome branch, Masen Naidoo and Arnold Wills, chair of the Wells DAA.
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.
