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.
