At a visit to a cancer centre in Kent, Boris Johnson, supposedly unveiled plans for what he portrayed as two new care standards that would ensure people in England with the disease get diagnosed more quickly, however he has been accused of a “shameful spinning” of key pledges on cancer care in an attempt to distract from the NHS’s record 6 million-strong backlog of people on waiting lists.
Opposition parties condemned the move as a “pathetic rehashing of old pledges” and a cynical attempt to try to persuade the media to reduce their focus on a row between the government and NHS chiefs over how quickly hospitals can be expected to treat the hundreds of thousands of patients who have been waiting between one and two years for surgery.
Full story in The Guardian, 7 February 2022