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The gift of lifesaving

On Saturday evening I had the sad experience of witnessing an unsuccessful resuscitation attempt on a young man.

My daughters and I were walking past a stationary bus outside the train station when we noticed a collapsed man on the bus with passengers standing around him.

My daughter is a paramedic and I am a nurse so we boarded the bus to see if we could help. It turns out that the young man got on the bus but soon slumped in his seat and had been like this for about 5 minutes.

With help from the bus passengers we were able to get the man in a more accessible place in the bus and my daughter began CPR. Someone had already called 999 and the paramedics were soon on scene.

The point of my letter is to highlight the lack of public knowledge about what to do in this kind of emergency.

It is likely that the outcome would have been the same as the percentage of successful resuscitations outside hospitals is low.To be trained in basic life support is something that the majority of people should have access to.

I just feel sad that there will be other similar situations when nothing is done in time and lives will be lost. I would like to say how great the people were on the bus once direction was given and there was no hesitation to help in any way they could. Perhaps our politicians would like to find funding for this training rather than wasting public money in the various ways they seem expert at.

Name supplied

Vote against dishonesty

Over the course of the last few weeks both Google and YouTube have removed several Tory party adverts for being misleading or untruthful, Facebook’s independent fact checking service has stated that 88 per cent of the Tory party’s election advertisements are misleading, the Tory party has been caught changing the name of one of its Twitter account so it appeared to belong to an independent fact checking organisation, and the Tory party has been caught setting up a fake Labour Party website.

This comes on top of electing Boris Johnson as leader of the Tory party who promptly went on to break the law when trying to silence opposition to his plans by suspending parliament.

Along with other senior members of the Tory party such as Gove, he is largely responsible for creating a huge schism in our society with their lies during the 2016 EU referendum campaign.

Indeed, two further lies relating to the EU appear on the cover the Tory manifesto and have central stage in the current election campaign, specifically ‘get Brexit done’ and ‘Unleash Britain’s Potential’.

The first wrongly implies that passing the Withdrawal Act will be the end of the Brexit process, when in fact it will just be the start, as our future relationship with the EU will still need to be negotiated as will some 760 trade and other agreements with nations all around the world.

The second falsely implies that the EU has been holding this country back, when in fact the EU and the Single Market are what unleashed our country’s potential after we went bust in the mid 1970s.

And then we have the issue of the part of the leave campaign run by Johnson, Gove and Cummings breaking both electoral law and data protection law and still being under criminal investigation by the police.

If that wasn’t enough there is also the issue of the suppression by the current leadership of the Tory party of the Russian report widely expected to show Russian meddling in British politics including the 2016 referendum, along with the outstanding police investigation into the activities of the current leader of the Tory party while he was mayor of London.

The Tory party is rotten and corrupted to the core. For me, Thursday is not about policies, it is about the type of people we want to govern us, and the way we want our political system to work. I do not wish our government to be made up of individuals who have demonstrated utter contempt for the electorate with their lies and illegal actions. I will therefore be voting for the person who I believe has the best chance of beating the incumbent Tory, Robert Buckland, in my constituency of Swindon South, which happens to be the Labour Candidate, Sarah Church. I will do this despite the fact that I abhor socialism. It is also worth noting that even if the Tory party manages to gain a majority this coming Thursday, they will not have a legitimate mandate for anything given the way they have attempted to deceive the electorate.

I do not want deception to be part of the political norm in this country. If you feel the same, I would urge you to vote for whoever stands the best chance of defeating the Tory party in your constituency, whichever party they may represent.

Dr Adam Poole, Wroughton