by Rob Marchant
While Westminster has been alight with chatter over whether or not Rachel Reeves misrepresented the facts in the run-up to her Budget, events have been happening in parallel which are likely to have a far longer shadow for Keir Starmer and his crew. Indeed, they are situations which, if left as they are, will continue to have brutal repercussions long after they all leave office.
The first was Wes Streeting’s announcement last month of the puberty blockers trial, due to kick off in the New Year.
When the Cass report landed in April last year, campaigners looking to protect Britain’s children from the harm of untested medicines were surely so overjoyed to see that thousands of lives could be protected from likely sterilisation and severe health problems in later life, that less focus was given to one of the report’s other recommendations, on the smaller number children which it recommended be recruited for a clinical trial, to finally put a stop to any debate on the efficacy of said treatment.
It seemed churlish to complain about this matter of the fine print, when the main battle, over ceasing the general puberty-blocker programme, had already been won. But now the last grain of sand has fallen into the bottom of the egg timer and the trial, which it was easy to blithely assume would never start, is about to begin.
This means that 226 children will be legally taking the same drugs which have been declared illegal for thousands of others diagnosed with gender dysphoria. To recap: these drugs have never been approved for this use; the treatment is experimental, with some horrific side effects; and consent cannot be meaningfully given by minors as young as 10, most of whom are too young to have experienced pubertal changes, let alone sex.
(And if, after Cass, you still truly believe that there is a medical case for using puberty blockers, I direct you to this disturbing video, in which no less a figure than the president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) admits that all children to date who have been treated with them prior to puberty – Tanner Stage 2 – have ended up anorgasmic.)
To say this trial is controversial is something of an understatement. For many, blockers represent a scandalous experiment on minors, at the “extreme risk”, as campaigner and author Helen Joyce put it, of permanently ruining their sex lives and general health; a historic mistake on the part of Health Secretary, Wes Streeting.
Nonetheless, he seems intent on proceeding, in a way that seems emblematic of the government’s somewhat cavalier attitude to the rights of women and children. In the same week, outgoing EHRC chief Kishwer Falkner, interviewed in the Times last week, that the Labour government has “abandoned” women, referencing Bridget Philipson’s blocking of her issuing the EHRC’s guidance on the impacts of the Supreme Court judgement on “sex meaning sex”, as well as its inability to call out Pakistani men as an important factor in the grooming gangs scandal (we might also note that the last time the Labour Party crossed swords with the EHRC, it was over its poor treatment of Jews, and it didn’t end well; it is now women).
This blind spot on women’s issues will cost Labour dear, but nowhere more dear than the harm to be caused to that small cross-section of the country’s children. Former Labour MP Rosie Duffield has also put together a cross-party letter to Streeting, requesting that the trial be pulled. It should be, before the lives of 266 children, not to mention his own career and conscience, are all permanently blighted by this decision.
And then there is Assisted Dying. This last week, proof has come to light of what many suspected, that although formally neutral, Labour figures had actually planned all along to make it effectively a Labour bill by driving the legislation forward “under the radar” as a Private Members Bill, easing its path through the Commons and helping remove obstacles for Kim Leadbeater.
This makes it look grubby and disingenuous but, even before that, the bill has had substantial resistance: not just from those who reject the premise of Assisted Dying on religious or moral grounds but, more importantly, from those who simply think it poorly drafted and lacking in adequate safeguards. The Lords’ review has resulted in an unprecedented 1,071 amendments to the legislation. While supporters of the flawed bill simply dismiss this as filibustering, it is a more convincing argument that this actually the Lords doing its job, in a bill which its critics feel should never have been introduced in this inappropriate, back-door way.
Finally, this week has seen the bombshell news that the Justice Secretary, David Lammy, is going to abolish trial by jury for all but a few, very serious crimes. Critics say it will likely have little impact in terms of reducing the pressure on the British courts system, but see slashing what many see as its jewel in its crown, one which has survived over 800 years, as disastrous (for good measure, Lammy is also now being accused of cooking the books on rape statistics, to justify his point).
For a short-term operational fix, it would be a historic change to the way Britain does things, in a legal system where, for example, rape hardly ever gets to trial in the first place. Labour MPs are already set to rebel, including its former Deputy Leader, Angela Rayner.
In all these cases, whether it be jury trials; the lives of vulnerable adults who might be desperate, broke or coerced; or the long-term mental, physical and sexual health of hundreds of under-18s; there are serious and very reasonable public objections; and all very much cases of “we’ll miss them when they’re gone”.
After David Cameron’s “big idea” of Brexit, many of us were probably hoping that political ideas would be resoundingly pint-sized from hereon in. But these three big ideas are not only major moral disaster areas: they are ones of a magnitude which surely make or break political careers and, quite probably, produce deep regrets into old age among those who pushed them through, in the face of perfectly reasonable objections.
These three things can all be undone: but time is surely running out to do so.
Rob Marchant is an activist and former Labour party manager who blogs at The Centre Left
Tags: Assisted dying, Cass, Jury trial, puberty blockers, Rob Marchant, Wes Streeting
