Water Marks

A water shortage in Britain is almost comically absurd even before considering how wet this spring was. Opposition to the renationalisation of water, leading to the National Grid that was proposed in the Labour manifesto of 1979, is as ridiculous as support for the nationalisation of every corner shop. Massively in control of drought-stricken Kent, does Reform UK agree? If not, why not?

Reform has never repudiated the endorsement of Bonnie Blue, who has made her own singular contribution to the water debate, and its candidate at Makerfield was a Remain voter, as was its candidate at Gorton and Denton. This is starting to look like a pattern, or even a policy. Still, it does compel Remainers to claim as their own the desire to smell and lick the backside of Carol Vorderman. What a rare and welcome point of unity between them and Reform supporters, with Remain voters now the majority of people who still voted Conservative. To be so broadly appreciated, how fortunate is Ms Vorderman.

Facing Robert Kenyon is Restore Britain's Rebecca Shepherd, whose husband in a Dutch-Indonesian immigrant. Is he a Muslim? At any rate, their business model is purely parastatal, consisting entirely of the provision of therapeutic equine activities to the Special Educational Needs and Disability Service of Wigan Council. To my mind, that is a noble pursuit. But would Restore voters agree? Would Rupert Lowe?

Restore has just given Reform control of Norfolk County Council after all, so how many local authorities have to be run by either or both of them before Andy Burnham reconsidered his Old New Labour fixation with regional devolution? Labour is also tied with Reform for a distant second place at Holyrood, where it has not governed in 19 years, and it is in a very distant third place in the Senedd. There have been seven elections to the London Mayoralty, and Labour has only ever won four of them, three with Sadiq Khan and the fourth with a man who, having already wiped the floor with Labour as an Independent, would have done so again. The Greens are highly likely to take it next time. Yet Burnham even wants to give councils responsibility for providing asylum accommodation, as if the relevant committees would still be made up of his dad's mates from the union and the Catenians.

If Burnham won Makerfield, though, then that would be a sign of the changing times. Palantir is still everywhere, which urgently needs to be addressed, and which would not be so by Burnham. But Peter Thiel himself has fled to Argentina, of course, while JD Vance has had to go so far as to issue an official denial that he was abandoning his hopes of the Presidency in 2028. When you have to say it. And Reformers and Restorers alike, what do you think of Thiel's new host, Javier Milei? He thinks that the Falkland Islands are part of Argentina. As, presumably, does Thiel. So that as, presumably, does Vance.

Court Correspondent

This man spent £750 on Dyson hairdryers.

Elsewhere in the courts, the first jury had already convicted Mohammed Fahir Amaaz of three counts of assault, and he is on remand awaiting sentence on 26 June, so there was no ethnic or sectarian politics at play when it was unable to reach a verdict on the actual bodily harm charge against him and Muhammad Amaad. Nor could the second jury, so the case for that must simply have been weaker. Who cares what might have been on television or the Internet?

Both trials were held in Liverpool, which is 77.3 per cent White British, five per cent Other White, a notably low 1.4 per cent White Irish, 0.2 per cent White Roma, and 0.1 per cent White Gypsy or Irish Traveller. A nice, round 80 per cent White. It is wildly unlikely that a blocking minority might have been by provided once by the Pakistani 0.8 per cent of Liverpudlians, or even by a combination of that, the Bangladeshi 0.4 per cent, and the Arab 1.7 per cent. For that to have happened twice on the same indictment would be vanishingly improbable. Two juries having failed to reach a verdict, a third trial would be for something with a maximum sentence a lot higher than five years, and an average sentence far higher than one and a half.

That said, last year, when there was literally no evidence against me, and the Police had sacked the investigating officer for his conduct of my case, my barrister told me that what has since been acknowledged to be my baseless record made me unacquittable by a jury that anyway just would not have liked a defendant who dressed well, spoke well, and read books, so I was going to have to go guilty even though the whole thing depended on blog posts that did not exist, purportedly detected by a policeman who had been drummed out. At best, I might have hoped for a hung jury, but my brief had already established with the Prosecutor that the CPS would have sought a retrial. The vendetta against me was that obsessive. I am very, very proud that the right-wing Labourites, liberal Catholics twice a year, considered me more dangerous than almost anyone charged with murder, never mind ABH.

Ah, yes, murder. That same CPS will not be seeking the extradition of Kenneth Law, despite his 79 known victims in the United Kingdom. Were they all in England or Wales? If not, then might an extradition to Scotland or Northern Ireland be possible? The CPS is serving notice. If it will not prosecute this, then it would not prosecute any assisted suicide. Is that also true of the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service? Or of the Public Prosecution Service for Northern Ireland?

Still, the CPS has successfully prosecuted Vickrum Digwa for the murder of Henry Nowak. Fresh from wanting to ban kosher slaughter, Rupert Lowe now also wants to alienate the strongest opponents of ritual slaughter by banning the kirpan. Yet Digwa's murder weapon was not his ceremonial kirpan, being far larger than those customarily worn at least in this country, where, moreover, they are usually dull-edged. And Lowe favours something like the Second Amendment for the Britain from which he advocated mass deportations. Think on.

NEET Spirit

The open attempt to kick people out of their wheelchairs could not even have passed on the votes of the Opposition as such things did under Tony Blair, so Alan Milburn was sent away to come up with the latest rubbish. The plan is to expand it to all ages within a year or two. But the truth is that youth unemployment at more than double the present rate was considered fine and dandy in the Thatcher years, that only seven per cent of out-of-work benefits go to those under 25, that half of NEETs do not claim benefits, that therefore only one in 14 16-to-24 year olds is on them, that the benefits bill now stands at a lower rate of GDP than it did under David Cameron, that cutting anyone’s benefits would neither cure them nor find them a job, that if you think that you can get PIP for “mild” mental health conditions then you should try it, that a politician or a journalist is not qualified to diagnose the severity of a mental illness, that a record 62 per cent of PIP claims are rejected, and that PIP is an in-work benefit, yet Rachel Charlton-Dailey writes:

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) released the interim report for the Milburn Review on Youth Unemployment yesterday. The report was an exercise in how the DWP has a compliant corporate media at its beck and call. But as always, we need to look at the parts of the report the DWP didn’t want shouted from the rooftops.

Corporate shills marching to the DWP’s beat

The corporate media, of course, had a field day yesterday getting to crow about the ‘lost generation’, especially those with mental health conditions. At one point, both the BBC and Guardian were running live rolling coverage. Yes, of an interim report into youth unemployment.

But what was missing is that the report is, in places, quite nuanced on disability. It actually acknowledges that there are many different reasons why the level of disability or poor health has increased in the last decade. This includes socioeconomic factors such as the cost of living, growing up in poverty, and lack of support.

It also mentions inadequate support in schools and that Covid had a huge part to play in both creating and exacerbating underlying conditions.

However, by only relating these factors back to how it stops kids from getting into work, Milburn ignores that disabled people deserve to be supported to have a good life regardless of whether they can work.

Milburn presents opinion as fact

Despite him actually setting out the logical reasons why disabled young people are much more likely to be unemployed, this is Alan Milburn, so he still has to blame them.

There are many examples of Milburn adding his own opinion disguised as fact, and by doing so, completely rubbishing the actual evidence provided.

After including a report on young people’s psychological distress, he says:

It confirms that what we are seeing is not simply a change in how young people talk about their mental health. It is a change in their capacity to participate. There is a difference between a generation that is more willing to name its struggles and a generation that is functionally less able to engage with education and work.

Basically, talk about it all you want, but do it at work or shut up.

Implying depression and ADHD aren’t real disabilities

What’s most interesting is that disability and health are split into separate sections. Disability is basically classed as something which does need support, and he accepts that many disabled people will never be able to work.

However, he then includes mental health and neurodivergent (which he calls neurodevelopmental) conditions in the health section. This states clearly that he thinks these aren’t real disabilities and shouldn’t be seen as an excuse not to work.

He also shows what he thinks about anxiety and depression by saying:

This explosion has primarily been in mental health issues such as anxiety and depression, rather than in serious mental illnesses.

Milburn also essentially blames the rise in ADHD and diagnosis for the strain on the NHS. Coincidentally, this is also what Wes Streeting is trying (and failing) to do with his review into overdiagnosis.

After giving the evidence of why more young people (especially girls) are being diagnosed with neurodivergent conditions now, he can’t resist contradicting the evidence again:

If the rise in diagnoses were simply the correction of historic under-recognition, the response would be straightforward: more assessment capacity and more clinical treatment.

If, as the evidence increasingly suggests, the current patterns are shaped as much by the design of systems as by underlying need, including the incentives those systems create and the tendency to medicalise forms of distress that may have broader social or developmental roots, then the response must be broader.

Basically, our systems weren’t designed for you to realise you’re not the problem. But instead of solutions to make the system better, he, of course, relates it back to kids just not getting off their bums and working.

He is so close to getting it, but can’t resist:

It must include earlier, more accessible forms of support that do not depend on long waits for specialist diagnosis. And it must address the social determinants producing the distress in the first place: poverty, family instability, social media.

Critically, as there seems to have been a widening of what is recognised as disability within the system – and with it an expansion of the range of diagnoses and conditions that legitimise non-participation – the key issue is not the label itself but the functional impact. Until the health – and wider – system gets to grips with that key distinction, too many young people will be categorised as unfit to work when, with help, support and earlier intervention, they would be able to do so.

Review isn’t proving Milburn’s foregone conclusion

Despite all this bluster about wanting to support young disabled people into work, Access to Work is mentioned just three times in this almost 68,000-word report. Once as part of a support package, then in the annex explaining what it is and then again as a footnote.

It’s a tale as old as time, the DWP pretends to care about getting disabled people into work, but wants as little attention brought to the support they’re trying to cut as possible.

Essentially, this is exactly the same problem Wesley had with trying to prove ADHD is overdiagnosed. Despite Milburn already deciding that kids are faking disability not to work, the evidence very much says that disabled young people need support. And no amount of his snide comments and DWP-induced media hysteria will change that.

And:

Yesterday saw the release of the interim report of the Milburn Review into youth unemployment. However, it completely contradicts everything the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is already doing to make life harder for unemployed and disabled young people.

A media circus instead of support

The long-awaited report was supposed to delve into why so many young people are unemployed. However, that was never going to be the whole story when it was run by Alan Milburn.

Once you got past the DWP-created media circus, the report was Milburn’s attempt to prove his foregone conclusion that young people were faking disability, despite the evidence saying otherwise. While the former health secretary was forced to acknowledge the actual nuanced reasons that kids struggle to get into work, he then contradicted all of them by presenting his own opinions on the topic as fact.

For example, after including a report on young people’s psychological distress, he said:

It confirms that what we are seeing is not simply a change in how young people talk about their mental health. It is a change in their capacity to participate. There is a difference between a generation that is more willing to name its struggles and a generation that is functionally less able to engage with education and work.

While the report pretended to set out all the evidence so Milburn could move forward and work on solutions, the DWP is actually already contradicting it.

DWP contradicts own report

The report claims to want to support young disabled people so they can get into work. However, the way the government is trying to keep them from accessing that support says otherwise.

Currently, the DWP is pushing ahead with the youth guarantee, which will force young people into any work. This applies whether or not it’s their chosen career. The scheme has been criticised for pushing young people into military and war-related careers. Most recently, the department celebrated McDonald’s joining the youth guarantee. As a result, young people will be forced into low-skilled jobs that are rife with harassment.

Alongside this, they’re also systematically stripping disabled people of benefits. The DWP chief Pat McFadden refused to rule out scrapping the health element of Universal Credit for disabled people under the age of 22. They’ve also cut Universal Credit for new disabled claimants. This means anyone who claims now will get half what a disabled claimant got last year.

All of this is despite the fact that the DWP’s own figures revealed that work poses a serious health and suicide risk for young disabled claimants.

Even though the DWP is forcing more disabled people into work, they’re of course doing absolutely nothing to support them. To the point where they’re actively cutting Access to Work (AtW) and stripping people of the support they’re already entitled to. There’s also a monumental backlog of people waiting for Access to Work, and in March, it was 66,000. Most recently the DWP crowed about hiring new AtW advisors, despite them being shamed into it.

DWP doesn’t care

What’s clear from all of this is that the DWP is hellbent on destroying disabled people’s lives. However, they know that in order to do that, they need to create a narrative of who deserves benefits. This is exactly what they’re doing by making themselves look like the saviour of unemployed disabled people.

Let Us Not Abandon Our Children

Aiden Abbott writes:

Keir Starmer is set to continue his valiant crusade against children using the internet, with a “game-changer” policy package reportedly in the offing. Though this won’t involve a total, Australia-style ban on social media for under-16s, the consensus among the civil society groups involved in the consultation, such as the Molly Rose Foundation and the NSPCC, is evidently in favour of further restrictions. These include calls for social media platforms to remove functions like disappearing messages and the ability to talk with strangers for younger users, as well as allegedly “addictive” features such as auto-play on videos and “infinite scrolling”. 

Readers may remember a similar spasm of prohibitionism during the twilight months of Rishi Sunak’s government, when the Tories attempted to put the kibosh on disposable vapes, nitrous oxide and mobile phones in schools. [There should have been an Oxford comma there. Or should there?] Starmer, apparently, has decided this is a winning strategy. Given the bipartisan support enjoyed by the Online Safety Act, it must look like an easy win. And, God knows, Starmer could use a win.

Yet while some of the incoming reforms have merit, much of the thinking behind them rests on the blithe assumption that social media has an addictive power comparable to crack cocaine or alcohol. That claim is routinely backed up by scary maps of brains lit up with dopamine. Of course, there are many other phenomena which produce dopamine, and one wonders whether we could draw up similarly scary maps of the brains of people holding a puppy or gazing at someone with whom they are in love.

For all that politicians stress how terrible phones and laptops are for us, the evidence is far more dubious than one might expect. According to 33 studies, analysed by 14 authors for a research paper by the American Psychological Association in 2021, screen usage apparently plays “little role in mental health concerns”. In any case, there is a far more straightforward explanation than so-called addiction as to why young people might spend their free time online: that modern life is cloistered and oppressive, and the internet is not.

A 16-year-old today will have lost a considerable chunk of their remembered life so far to Covid lockdowns. Looking ahead, they will see a grim employment market, with graduate job listings falling by 33% between 2024 and 2025. A rising cost of living is pushing the possibility of moving out further and further away. If the Government gets its way, nobody born after 2008 will ever be able to legally purchase a pack of cigarettes.

As young people’s lives become increasingly constrained, as the horizon of possibility closes in, the internet remains dazzlingly infinite: the largest, most readily accessible corpus of information mankind has ever compiled. From the picture painted by Starmer or Kemi Badenoch, one would assume there is nothing there except revenge porn and YouTube Shorts of household objects being put in a hydraulic press. That it is also the medium by which virtually all literature ever written has become freely available to all, that it has left the press infinitely safer from the kind of state thuggery to which it was once subjected by the likes of Alastair Campbell, apparently does not warrant a mention.

Though fellow party leaders Nigel Farage and Zack Polanski have rightly noted the authoritarian nature of Starmer’s attacks on online freedom, the underlying thesis has gone virtually unchallenged: that young people using the internet is dangerous and unhealthy. Until opponents of the Online Safety Act can bring themselves to articulate a positive case for the internet on its own grounds, we will find ourselves forever on the back foot. The stakes are too high. Think back to that supposed intellectual golden age before the algorithms turned our brains to mush — the age of the TV guide. Of Bargain Hunt and Fat Families. Of James Corden and onesie-clad Eurovision parties. Let us not abandon our children, on whom this country has been hard enough, to the clammy embrace of the Gogglebox sofa.

Kemi Badenoch and Jess Phillips are of one mind in wishing to ban under-16s from social media, lest they discover that, for example, Britain’s projected spending of 10.6% of GDP on welfare was lower than in much of Europe, with more than half of it going to the recipients of what was nevertheless the lowest pension of any comparable country, and with two in five Universal Credit claimants in work, such that the State was subsidising low pay by corporations that paid kings’ ransoms at the top. By such means as to avoid most or all taxation, of course.

If, as Wes Streeting would have it, social media were comparable to smoking, then would Phillips or Badenoch consider herself powerless to stop under-16s from smoking in her home? Would she have much sympathy with any adult who professed such impotence? These comparisons reinforce the point that the responsibility is parental. The technology is available, and few parents of under-16s grew up offgrid. They did, however, grow up without the digital ID that everyone would need to make this ban work. And that freedom is worth passing on.

1926: The BBC’s Original Sin

Daniel Lewis writes:

The BBC did not lose its impartiality. It was born with a government hand on its shoulder.

In May 1926, as millions of workers stood with the miners against wage cuts and longer hours, Britain’s young broadcaster faced its first great political test. It failed it. Not by accident. Not through confusion. But because John Reith and the BBC chose order over truth, government over labour, and establishment stability over working-class struggle.

One minute before midnight on 3 May 1926, the largest strike in British history began. Triggered by a dispute over coal miners’ pay and working hours, it drew millions into strike action, including workers in iron and steel, on the docks, in transport and printing, gas and electricity. But less than nine days after it started, the General Strike was called off, and representatives of the Trades Union Congress visited Downing Street to admit defeat.

Those nine days in May were important for the BBC, which was then in its early years. At the time, the ‘British Broadcasting Company’ was being run as a private commercial institution with John Reith as its General Manager. Because of printing workers being on strike, most national newspapers were shut down, making the BBC’s radio bulletins an important source of information for the public.

Throughout the strike, the BBC displayed an egregious bias in favour of the government and against the strikers. In several of Reith’s statements, he was quite frank about this bias: he was clear that, at the end of the day, the BBC had to be “for the government” and that he would not allow anything to be broadcast “which might have prolonged or sought to justify the Strike”. In his diary, he admitted that the government “know that they can trust us not to be really impartial”.

This lack of impartiality manifested in a number of ways. The BBC regularly gave a direct voice to government ministers and other anti-strike politicians while refusing to do the same for trade unionists, or even for Ramsay MacDonald’s far-from-radical Labour Party. It also spread misinformation, claiming that there was a trend of railway workers going back to work, when in fact 97% stayed out on strike. Strikers learned not to trust what the BBC said after telegramming in corrections which were never broadcast, and for some it earned the name of ‘BFC’ – British Falsehood Company.

Two instances are particularly revealing. On Friday 7 May, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, wanted to broadcast an appeal calling for the strike to end and for negotiations to continue. The Archbishop was no radical, having condemned the strike several days earlier. But because he called both for the strike to end and for negotiations to continue, rather than insisting the strike end first, the BBC refused to broadcast his appeal. The next day, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin addressed the nation at Reith’s invitation, speaking from Reith’s own home rather than BBC headquarters. Reith even helped Baldwin with the speech, suggesting what he should and should not say.

One reason for this biased behaviour, and the excuse Reith often gave for it, was the threat of government takeover if the BBC did not toe the line. Some, like then-Chancellor Winston Churchill, were keen to run it as a direct government mouthpiece, and Reith was convinced that the only way this could be avoided was if the government was assured that the BBC was clearly on its side.

But pragmatism was not the only factor. Reith was ideologically on the side of the establishment and against the labour movement. He described himself as having a “distaste for organised labour”, and saw part of the BBC’s job as the preservation of order. Decades later, he wrote that “if there had been broadcasting at the time of the French Revolution, there would have been no French Revolution”, and his reactionary politics even extended to admiration for Mussolini and Hitler. 

Reith’s view was that the BBC could best fulfil its role as protector of the establishment if it had a veneer of independence. He successfully avoided Churchill’s desired takeover in part because of the force of his argument that a takeover could lead to the loss of public trust and undermine the BBC’s “pioneer work of three and a half years”, weakening “an influence of almost unlimited potency”. Reith also recalled having told Churchill to his face that “if we put out nothing but government propaganda we should not be doing half the good we were”. In context, the “influence” and “the good” he was talking about clearly meant influencing the public to be against the strike.

In the aftermath of the strike’s defeat, coal miners were forced to go back to work for longer hours and lower wages than they had previously. All over the country, workers who had gone on strike were victimised, and anti-trade union legislation was enacted in Parliament. For John Reith, however, this period brought considerable rewards. He was repaid for his services to the state with a knighthood, and got his long-held wish for the BBC to become a public institution. It was renamed the British Broadcasting Corporation, with a Royal Charter and Reith as its Director-General.

The lesson is not that every BBC journalist is a liar. That is too crude, and too easy to dismiss. The lesson is more serious. Institutions built to appear independent can still serve power. They do not need daily orders from ministers. They learn the limits. They absorb the assumptions. They know which voices are respectable, which are dangerous, and which can be safely ignored.

One century after the General Strike, leading BBC figures still invoke its ‘Reithian spirit’. But the Corporation has lost much of the public confidence it once enjoyed. Its coverage of Gaza, where Israel stands accused of genocide before the International Court of Justice, has only deepened that distrust. A look at the BBC’s early history should show us that institutional bias should not be a surprise, and that its independence from the state was compromised from the very start.

But I Can Tell The Truth

Claire Abernathy writes:

Imagine getting put on testosterone at 14 years old because doctors convinced you that if you didn’t, you may be suicidal.

While I was physically very healthy, I was emotionally and mentally vulnerable — struggling with profound discomfort in my body after childhood sexual abuse. In the eyes of the medical system, that distress was enough to justify permanently altering my body before I was old enough to fully understand what was being taken from me. 

This is my story, and one that I look back on with regret and immense pain.

A week after my 14th birthday, I was prescribed testosterone and no one meaningfully explored alternatives. No one addressed the underlying trauma beneath my dysphoria. No one suggested that adolescence itself can be painful and confusing, particularly for girls dealing with abuse.

Eight months later, surgeons performed a double mastectomy on me. My entire life changed within months.

Now, at 21 years old, I live with the consequences every hour of my life, but I share my story to expose the dangers of irreversible gender transition procedures on minors.

The public conversation around pediatric gender transition is often sanitized beyond recognition. People speak in high-level terminology like “affirmation,” “identity” and “self-expression.” What they rarely discuss are the actual physical outcomes many of us now live with that we were painfully unaware of.

I suffer from severe urological complications. If my bladder becomes too full, I experience intense pain. Sometimes I bleed. Sometimes I lose control of my bladder entirely. There have been periods of my life when I had to wear adult diapers because of the damage testosterone caused to my pelvic floor and urinary system. I also suffer from vaginal atrophy, another common but downplayed consequence of testosterone exposure in female patients. Gynecological exams routinely leave me injured and bleeding. Penetration can cause tearing. Many female detransitioners and even women who continue identifying as transgender quietly endure these same injuries, often without doctors equipped to help them.

And then there is the pain most doctors barely warned me about at all.

Testosterone enlarged my clitoris to the point that it constantly chafes against clothing. Five years after stopping testosterone, the pain has never subsided. I structure my wardrobe, movement, and daily life around avoiding physical discomfort. My remaining option would be an invasive corrective surgery that carries the risk of permanently destroying sexual sensation altogether.

This was presented to me as healthcare.

One of the hardest side effects to grapple with is what was done to my voice. Before transition, I was deeply involved with choir and theater. I won awards for my performances. My voice was not incidental to who I was — it was one of the primary ways I connected with the world.

Testosterone permanently damaged it.

Today, I cannot project properly. I cannot scream without pain. If I speak for too long, my throat strains and weakens. I have recurring nightmares where I am in danger but physically incapable of calling for help. That fear is not symbolic but rooted in my reality.

This is before even getting to the surgical complications.

At 14 years old, surgeons removed my healthy breasts. I was too young to vote, rent a car, sign legal contracts, or understand motherhood in any meaningful way, but I was somehow considered capable of consenting to irreversible bodily mutilation.

The clinic specialized in “drains-free” mastectomies, a procedure associated with higher rates of nipple graft complications. Parts of my chest tissue turned black and died. I was left with open wounds and permanent nerve damage.

I never became a boy. No one can change sex. But I did permanently lose the ability to breastfeed any future children I may have.

That reality feels heavier as I get older.

I told medical professionals about my sexual abuse. I told them when my distress began. Three separate clinicians still signed off on my transition. Not one of them paused long enough to ask the obvious questions.

And the most horrifying part is that what they did to me was — and is — considered the standard of care.

Why was a young girl suddenly rejecting her body after trauma? Why was psychological suffering being treated with endocrine disruption and surgery instead of intensive therapy? Why were healthy organs being removed from a child who was clearly in distress?

The answer, increasingly, seems to be ideology and ideology only.

Healthy children should not be sacrificed to an ideology that treats self-reported gender distress as proof that a child was born in the wrong body. No fourteen-year-old is capable of understanding sterilization, lifelong sexual dysfunction, chronic pain, or the grief of losing bodily functions they were never mature enough to value in the first place.

The model of pediatric gender medicine operating in America today overwhelmingly prioritizes affirmation above caution. Children present with distress, discomfort, or confusion, and too often the medical system responds by placing them onto a fast-moving conveyor belt of hormones, surgeries and irreversible interventions.

There is no meaningful long-term evidence proving these interventions are safe for adolescents. There is no reliable tracking system for detransitioners or long-term complications. There are no adequate safeguards ensuring vulnerable children receive thorough psychological evaluation before life-altering medical interventions begin.

And as many of us grow older and realize we were harmed, we discover something even more devastating: almost no one in medicine knows how to help us recover.

I cannot restore what doctors removed from me. I cannot recover my original voice. I cannot undo the damage done to my body. 

But I can tell the truth.

To Sweat The Assets?

No, of course Jess Phillips did not threaten to resign over the appointment of Peter Mandelson. She did resign after having been gazumped by Harriet Harman, but even that was not because of the Paedophile Information Exchange, which has become background noise, like Kemi Badenoch’s having told LBC that she was “born in a country that was 50 per cent Muslim”, even though her British citizenship depended on her having been born in the United Kingdom before Margaret Thatcher had abolished birthright citizenship. Badenoch may have been naturalised, and as a Commonwealth citizen she would in any case be eligible to vote and stand in elections in this country and to hold office all the way up to Prime Minister. But that was not how she presented herself until 28 April 2026.

Far from the Conservatives’ having any objection to Commonwealth voting, their only gain in 2024 was Leicester East, Bob Blackman at Harrow East received the highest vote share for any Conservative candidate in the country, he was the only Conservative elected with an absolute majority, and he was one of only three Conservative MPs to be re-elected with increased majorities. Blackman has repeatedly been sworn in as an MP on the Bhagavad Gita, and at the House of Commons he hosted Tapan Ghosh, who was at least as violently opposed to Christians in Bengal as he was to Muslims.

Badenoch and Phillips are of one mind in wishing to ban under-16s from social media, lest they discover that, for example, Britain’s projected spending of 10.6% of GDP on welfare was lower than in much of Europe, with more than half of it going to the recipients of what was nevertheless the lowest pension of any comparable country, and with two in five Universal Credit claimants in work, such that the State was subsidising low pay by corporations that paid kings’ ransoms at the top. By such means as to avoid most or all taxation, of course.

If, as Wes Streeting would have it, social media were comparable to smoking, then would Phillips or Badenoch consider herself powerless to stop under-16s from smoking in her home? Would she have much sympathy with any adult who professed such impotence? These comparisons reinforce the point that the responsibility is parental. The technology is available, and few parents of under-16s grew up offgrid. They did, however, grow up without the digital ID that everyone would need to make this ban work. And that freedom is worth passing on.