Brexit: Vote Leave wipes NHS £350m claim and rest of its website after EU referendum
The cached version includes a banner image touting the pledge to ‘give our NHS the £350 million the EU takes every week’ – which has already been walked back by Leave supporters
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Your support makes all the difference.The official Leave campaign has wiped almost its entire website from the internet.
The site – which previously included the suggestion that the EU budget would be sent back to the NHS and included promises about trade deals – now just has a message thanking supporters.
The promises of Leave campaigners have come under scrutiny since the UK voted on Thursday, with leading politicians walking back promises over immigration control, NHS spending and the speed that Brexit will be undertaken.
Now all of those promises have been removed from the official site.
The site now just has a message reading “Thank You” at the top.
“It’s because of everyone involved, all across the country, that we achieved this magnificent result,” the page says. “This is your victory”.
The centrepiece of the old site was a collection of “Facts about the European Union”. Those included messages about NHS funding, immigration and trade deals.
The page also functioned as an archive of important interviews and speeches, and editorials written by people in support of Leave. Those pages are still available since only the homepage has been altered, meaning that they can be found through Google.
The site didn’t actually claim that the money saved from the EU budget would be spent on the NHS.
“The UK's official EU budget is about £350 million a week,” the relevant “fact” reads. “That’s about the same as the cost of building a new NHS hospital every week.
“We get less than half of this money back, and we have no control over how it’s spent – that’s decided by politicians and officials in Brussels, not the people we elect here.”
Because the old version of the website has been cached, sharing a link to it on Twitter still shows it. It can also be seen through caching websites like Archive.org.
Now there is just one remnant of the pledge remaining on the site. The picture of campaigners that is the site’s banner includes a bus that has the promise printed on its side – but the door is open and Boris Johnson and Michael Gove are stood in front of the words, meaning that it’s not possible to read it.
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