Why did 250k Britons die sooner than expected?

Boise Idaho is the only independent city (not part of a larger metro area) on that page listed with a lower murder rate than Toronto.

However, it’s not consistent year to year going from a vastly higher 5 per 100k in 2007 then dropping to 0.5 in 2008, then back to 2.9 in 2009 etc. Looking at the most recent years it’s roughly comparable with Toronto, but the long term average is higher. Suggesting it’s a more dangerous city with higher annual variance in rates. https://www.city-data.com/crime/crime-Boise-City-Idaho.html

Violent crime statistics are based on different standards in different areas and are therefore much harder to actually compare than dead bodies. Even with dead bodies there’s some ambiguity for people who died after the fact from injuries and when murder is more ambiguous etc. Violent crime rates between states let alone countries face different definitions, levels of reporting, etc so you really need to closely examine both raw data and methodology to do a solid assessment. Simply looking at official data from a Wikipedia table etc is very misleading.

It is wrong; see NHS Confederation[1] saying:

"In January, the average response time for a category 1 incident (where an immediate response is required to a life-threatening condition such as a cardiac arrest) was 8 minutes and 31 seconds. Although this is an improvement from the four preceding months, which were all over 9 minutes, the average across 2019 for comparison was 7 minutes and 12 seconds, and the ‘standard’ is 7 minutes.

This is even more pertinent for category 2 incidents, which include strokes and require rapid assessment and/or urgent transport and the standard is 18 minutes. In January this was over 38 minutes, and it passed 50 minutes in October and December. Although the standard was not regularly met pre-pandemic, the average across 2019 was still 23 minutes."

There's a muddled statistic from BBC News here[2]:

"Average waits of more than 90 minutes to reach emergency calls such as heart attacks - five times longer than the target time - with waits of over 150 minutes in some regions. Response times for the highest priority calls, such as cardiac arrests, taking close to 11 minutes - four minutes longer than they should"

(I don't know a difference between "heart attack" and "cardiac arrest".)

"The Royal College of Emergency Medicine believes up to 500 people a week could be dying because of the problems accessing emergency care."

But there are news articles of individual much longer waits:

"When Martin Clark, 68, started suffering with chest pains at home in East Sussex in November, his wife immediately called an ambulance. But none came. She phoned another three times before her and her son decided to drive Martin to hospital themselves 45 minutes later." - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-64243044

"More than half of Staffordshire's ambulances queue outside Stoke hospital on New Year's Eve [...] Some Category One calls - like heart attacks or anaphylactic shocks - have taken him 25 minutes to respond to, compared to a target time of around seven minutes due to a lack of available vehicles because of the queues." - https://news.sky.com/story/more-than-half-of-countys-ambulan... -

"A Grimsby woman thought to be having a stroke had to wait eight hours for an ambulance - and spent a further eight hours in the back of it outside hospital waiting to be seen." - https://www.grimsbytelegraph.co.uk/news/grimsby-news/distrau...

"A Southend pensioner was left waiting eight hours outside a hospital after a 48 hour delay for an ambulance [for a fall and cut head]." - https://www.echo-news.co.uk/news/20205197.southend-pensioner...

[1] https://www.nhsconfed.org/articles/what-latest-data-tell-us-...

[2] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-64254249