Plagiarism row erupts over MP's rival ventilator donation letters

A plagiarism accusation over rival ventilator letters has turned into a test of who first drove the campaign and how a donation request changed hands. Steve Eccleshall, a retired policeman and Ukraine volunteer, said he wrote to Labour MP Steve Witherden seeking help to release about 40 unused ventilators from Wrexham Maelor Hospital for Ukraine, only to see Witherden send a similar request days later that redirected the machines to Cuba.

Eccleshall said he met Witherden on 6 February 2026 near the Welsh border in Powys, alongside then-Welsh Parliament member Russell George and members of Bausley with Criggion Community Council. He said he handed the MP his letter in person at that meeting. The ventilators, he said, had been supplied during the Covid pandemic but were never used because of compatibility problems.

The paper trail then moved quickly. Witherden’s letter is dated 9 February 2026, three days after Eccleshall’s request, and asks Wrexham’s health board to donate the ventilators to Cuba instead of Ukraine. BBC Wales reported that some passages in the two letters made the same points, prompting Eccleshall to accuse Witherden of plagiarism. Witherden has not returned requests for comment.

The row has also brought Witherden’s role in Cuba-related parliamentary work into focus. Parliament’s register lists him as Chair and Registered Contact for the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Cuba, whose purpose is to meet visitors from Cuba and encourage UK-Cuba links. The group held its most recent annual general meeting in this Parliament on 6 January 2026. UK Parliament says all-party groups are informal cross-party bodies with no official status in Parliament.

According to the account of Witherden’s letter, he said Donald Trump’s policy aimed at blocking oil shipments to Cuba had worsened a humanitarian crisis, and that he had learned Cuba needed medical supplies during a visit there in October 2025. That places the MP’s intervention in the middle of a broader political and humanitarian push, while raising a narrower question about credit: whether Witherden simply advanced an existing appeal, or copied and repurposed Eccleshall’s proposal for a different destination.

For now, the documentary sequence is clear enough to matter. Eccleshall says he made the first request on behalf of Ukraine. Within three days, Witherden had sent his own letter, this time seeking a Cuban donation. The disagreement now turns on the contents of those letters, the timing, and whether the shift from Ukraine to Cuba changed only the destination or the politics of the donation itself.