Politics

The decision by Glasgow’s Sandyford gender clinic to pause the prescription of puberty blockers to children is good news for the children of Scotland.  In due course, a public inquiry is needed into how doctors ever got involved in what may possibly be one of the greatest medical scandals of all time. For now, however, it’s important that no more children are harmed by an experimental treatment that in many cases did not improve children’s mental health and sometimes made the situation worse. That’s what the Cass Report told us when it was published on 10 April. NHS England – who commissioned the report – had seen enough to halt

The Scottish nationalists are no stranger to hypocrisy, as their latest U-turn shows. For on Thursday afternoon the Yousaf regime — the only government in the UK which boasts Green politicians — announced that it was, er, ditching its flagship green commitments. Yes, that’s right, amid a litany of stories about SNP sleaze, the government confirmed it was throwing in the towel on its its 2030 carbon target. At least they’re consistent in their inconsistency… The ironically-named ‘wellbeing economy’ minister Màiri McAllan told Holyrood on Thursday that the Scottish government is abandoning its goal to cut carbon emissions by 75 per cent — but promised it will ‘pave the way

As a conservative non-smoker who in his youth was a libertarian twenty-a-day man, I can see both sides of the argument over the government’s recent anti-smoking legislation. Sure, cigarettes can be delicious, and it’s entirely up to the adult individual, not the state, whether he or she decides to light up. But as I finally came to accept eleven years ago, smoking is also a profoundly stupid habit, and if government interference can prevent people ever taking it up, then so be it. I was fervently against the 2007 smoking ban in pubs, but came to acknowledge that it greatly helped in the process of de-normalising smoking. And de-normalised smoking