Back in the day, if a male hospital patient wanted to show his willy to female patients, he had to be cunning about it. First, he’d have to get past the nursing sisters. If caught, he’d be back on the male ward – under a stern matron – before you could say: ‘Put that away, sir.’ Probably flanked by a couple of burly hospital porters.

Today, a man need only say he is a woman to access a female ward – and even showing his fellow patients his crown jewels may not be enough to get him removed.

Think I’m exaggerating? A doctor is bringing legal action against Greater Manchester Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust after a bearded male patient with ‘full male genitalia’ was admitted to one of its women’s psychiatric wards. When women complained that he had exposed himself, he was moved to a male ward – only for trust managers allegedly to intervene and send him back.

Many of the women there had been detained against their will under the Mental Health Act 1983. This meant they couldn’t simply leave if they felt unsafe. Some were also victims of sexual violence.

Sadly, none of this surprises me. Having interviewed more than a dozen NHS employees for a recent Telegraph investigation, I’ve learned just how spineless their bosses can be.

One nurse raised concerns about a male colleague using the women’s changing room years before the Supreme Court ruled, in 2025, that ‘man’, ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act refer to biological sex. After the ruling, the nurse’s trust instructed staff to use facilities corresponding to their sex. Yet even now the same man is still undressing alongside female colleagues. Apparently, his managers are still too gutless to tell him to get the hell out of the ladies’ changing room.

Elsewhere, a hospital receptionist I spoke to was subjected to an 18-month investigation after saying she did not believe transwomen were women. Cue months of Big Brother-style monitoring – including an allegation that she had been caught on CCTV removing ‘Introduction to Pronouns’ posters from hospital walls.

The internal documents that had been drawn up about the receptionist read like an ideological re-education programme. They describe her views as ‘worrying for somebody working in the NHS and patient-facing’. Emails speculate that she is a ‘TERF’ – a trans-exclusionary radical feminist. A definition circulated internally at the hospital claims TERFs believe transwomen are ‘actually men who are trying to invade women’s spaces’. It also characterises TERFs as having an ‘obsession with “biology”’. Somewhat ironic in a healthcare setting.

Even the Suffragette colours on her email profile were treated with suspicion. An LGBT network lead described them as ‘the TERF logo’ and demanded ‘immediate action’ to have them removed.

Many other NHS employees describe a ‘culture of fear’, wondering which colleagues it is safe to speak honestly around. A Pride lanyard or rainbow badge prompts caution, they say: might this be someone who objects to what they say – or to the basic truth that men cannot become women?

Several have seen colleagues who challenged trans ideology being pushed out – or so ground down that they left the NHS. The process is the punishment, of course. ‘I go to work, keep my head down and just try to stay out of trouble’, one ambulance worker told me.

While this culture of fear does not excuse the response at Greater Manchester, it may help explain how a man was returned to a female ward after behaviour that could potentially constitute a criminal offence. Whatever his mental state, exposing himself to female patients should have raised serious safeguarding concerns.

A ward manager reportedly pointed out that if a man wandered through the connecting corridor from the male ward into the female ward, there would be a ‘high-level investigation’. But if the same man says he is female, he can apparently be returned to the women’s ward – even after exposing himself to the women on that ward.

The senior psychiatrist bringing the legal action also asked whether a male member of staff who identified as a woman could be allowed to observe a vulnerable female patient showering, using the lavatory or changing a tampon. She says she was told that the female patient would have to advocate for herself and explain why she wanted same-sex care.

Meanwhile, when the male patient was placed back on the ward, the consultant in charge reportedly responded: ‘But what can you do about it?’ Well, quite a lot, actually. Unless you’re the kind of organisation that places men’s feelings above the safety, privacy and dignity of women.

Nearly 17 months after the Supreme Court clarified the meaning of sex in law, NHS leaders are still behaving as if the law is optional. Trans ideology may have been defeated in the courts, but the culture that produced this madness clearly lives on.

Poll after poll tells the same story: Britons are losing faith in their country, trust in their institutions and hope for the future. And no wonder. The economy is stagnant, the social fabric is fraying and politicians appear powerless to act. Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens was sounding the alarm over Britain’s decline long before it was fashionable to do so. He recently joined Brendan O’Neill on his podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show, to discuss what has gone wrong, why and whether we might ever recover. What follows is an edited extract from the conversation. You can watch the full episode here.

Brendan O’Neill: Is there a danger that, as law and order breaks down, as Britain’s borders are no longer enforced, we will start to see more vigilante-style action, as we’ve seen in Portsmouth and Dover recently?

Peter Hitchens: If you don’t enforce the law, then people will try to enforce it themselves, and then you get chaos. I hate chaos and I am not sympathetic to chaos from whatever direction it comes because it’s terrifying. I’m marked for life by visits to Mogadishu when it was being run by the gangs some years ago. I’ve seldom been so totally abjectly terrified in my life as living in a city where there was no order and where anything could happen. If you didn’t have bodyguards with submachine guns, and if you didn’t live in a guarded compound, then you would probably be dead in the morning. This is what happens when chaos comes.

So I’m terrified by outbreaks of disorder and it really does gravely worry me. I’m also terrified of the micro-disorder that affects so many people. The sort of thing we’ve seen in Middlesbrough recently has nothing to do with politics. It is to do with the fact that authority, law, punishment, deterrence and respect for anything are just vanishing. A lot of this is driven by the drugs which have been effectively legalised for many years, after a very assiduous campaign by the liberal classes beginning in the 1960s.

O’Neill: What’s your view on the state of free speech in Britain?

Hitchens: In my first book, The Abolition of Britain, I quoted, as I often do, the editor of Oz in the 1960s, Richard Neville. He’s a very clever man and he said – and it’s always stuck in my mind – there is an inch of difference between the Labour Party and the Conservative Party, but it is in that inch of difference that we all live. The result of the Blairisation of the Conservative Party under David Cameron was that that inch closed, and one of the main features of life since the Cameron takeover has been an almost total collapse of true freedom of speech and thought.

Now, if like me you think that it’s not in Britain’s national interest to pursue war with Russia, then basically you’re treated as a traitor. There is no room for debate about this. Whereas all the previous conflicts and troubles of the post-war period – from Suez to Vietnam – it was perfectly legitimate for people who were patriots to say that they opposed these things, and they weren’t dismissed as traitors or told they were Lord Haw-Haw, or pumping out Russian propaganda, which I would never dream of doing. Now you are, and it’s quite extraordinary. Anybody who can think will find themselves very rapidly on the dangerous edge of things.

Well, that’s all right in a free society, but in a society that has almost entirely forgotten how to be free and doesn’t much want to be, it becomes increasingly alarming.

O’Neill: How much of this is down to the lingering influence of Covid authoritarianism?

Hitchens: I was accused of killing my own readers. On one occasion, I was actually specifically accused of helping to bring about the death of an individual who I had never met or heard of. It was extraordinary. I don’t know what the word really is for it, but Salem comes to Britain in many ways. Any lingering beliefs that I’d had that the British people had a special desire for liberty and a special readiness to stand up to authority were almost wholly dispelled by that period.

This is another thing about the use of what I do or say. Every few days, as it happens, somebody will approach me in Marks and Spencer or on the street and say, ‘I really wanted to say how grateful I am for what you said’ during what they still tend to call the lockdown. I call it The Panic. And I understand what they’re saying. They were really, really concerned that there was no other voice, that they were beginning to think they’d gone crazy because no one was saying anything publicly in opposition to it. By opposing it, I at least gave them some comfort and that to me is something I’m always very pleased about, because they really mean it and it obviously did make a difference. Imagine being in such a circumstance and there being no voice against it. So it is worth it, but it doesn’t achieve anything material.

Peter Hitchens was speaking to Brendan O’Neill. Watch the full episode of The Brendan O’Neill Show here:

When future historians comb through the wreckage of the woke era, for clues as to what went wrong, one artefact in particular will startle them. It’s a photograph. It was taken on the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. And it shows the Archbishop of Canterbury, Sarah Mullally, sporting a smug liberal grin as she hands an award for ‘interfaith cooperation’ to some big Muslim fella. Who is he? Only someone who once gushed over Osama bin Laden, even bestowing upon him the honorific of ‘Sword of Allah’ for his lifetime of ‘fighting for Islam’.

Take that in. On the 25th anniversary of the apocalyptic barbarism unleashed on America by Osama bin Laden and his fash ‘mujahideen’, the spiritual leader of the Church of England was rubbing shoulders with a one-time OBL praiser. As our American cousins wept for loved ones who were burnt alive by al-Qaeda, England’s top bishop was smirking in the company of a bloke who once celebrated al-Qaeda’s leader as a ‘mujahid’ loved by God. If you were to put such a scene in a novel satirising the suicidal lunacy of woke, your editor would chastise you for overkill.

The man in the pic is Hafiz Muhammad Tahir Mehmood Ashrafi. What he lacks in principle he more than makes up for with names. He’s chairman of the All Pakistan Ulema Council. The CofE’s justification for giving him the Hubert Walter Award for Reconciliation and Interfaith Cooperation is that he once intervened in the case of a Pakistani Christian girl who’d been falsely accused of blasphemy. It was ‘outstanding work’, chirped the church, demonstrating Ashrafi’s ‘unwavering commitment to promoting religious tolerance’. Are you on drugs? Does Lambeth Palace not have the internet? Did not one person in the archbishop’s orbit think to spend three minutes on Google to check if Ashrafi really is a drippy hippy in a smock?

If they had, they’d have discovered that ‘religious tolerance’ is not quite his bag. They’d have found that Ashrafi and his batshit council were so horrified when the ‘blasphemer’ Salman Rushdie was knighted in 2007 that they retaliated by exalting bin Laden. Ashrafi said at the time: ‘If a blasphemer can be given the title “Sir” by the West despite the fact that he’s hurt the feelings of Muslims’ – ya big baby! – ‘then a mujahid who has been fighting for Islam against the Russians, Americans and British must be given the lofty title of Islam: Saifullah.’

There are old news reports about Ashrafi’s tit-for-tat honouring of the Islamofascist butcher of al-Qaeda all over the internet. I don’t know what’s worse: the CofE’s spiritual lethargy or its digital incompetence. What’s more, while Ashrafi may have sided with a Christian girl being menaced by a mob of Koran-bashers, he still fervently backs Pakistan’s barbaric blasphemy law. ‘There is no problem with the law’, he said in 2012. This is a law that makes it a capital offence to diss Muhammad. It’s a law under which more than 2,000 people have been prosecuted since the 1980s. And Ashrafi is fine with it.

Lambeth Palace has now rescinded the award, citing Ashrafi’s ‘previous comments’. This is not good enough. It was a sickening betrayal of our American allies for the spiritual leader of the English church to use the anniversary of 9/11 to fawn over a man who once honoured bin Laden. And it was an act of moral treachery against the Christians of Pakistan. Imagine you’re a Pakistani follower of Christ, your beliefs violently hated by Islamo-nutters, and you see no less than the Archbishop of Canterbury gurning with a man who backs the laws that make your life a misery and a minefield. If the church has even the tiniest remaining fibre of moral decency, it won’t just withdraw the award: it will put the archbishop herself in front of the cameras to explain her grotesque moral failings.

Then there’s the photograph. Mark my words, it will one day be treated as a historic document of the West’s descent into the bottomless chasm of cultural relativism. Doolally Mullally hands the award to a grinning Ashrafi. His wife is in the pic too, but we have no idea what expression she is wearing because she is wrapped head to toe in the misogynist black bag called a niqab. You can just about see her eyes peeping through her ninja get-up. Much was made of Mullally being the first-ever female Archbishop of Canterbury, yet here she is smiling next to a woman whose sinful flesh has been cloaked upon the orders of Islamic obscurantism. It feels jarring, chilling.

What has become of the Church of England? One by one it has sacrificed its beliefs at the altar of woke. It has eased up on Hell, calling it a mere state of non-being rather than eternal torment. It started blessing same-sex unions but said it’s still ‘dishonourable’ to have gay sex. It later removed the word ‘dishonourable’. Confusing much? It has all but abandoned Christianity’s core belief – that Christ is the only route to salvation – and now says ‘God’s grace’ can be found in other religions, too. Presumably even in religions that stone to death apostates and put women in binbags. And it now obsessively flagellates itself over the long-gone crime of slavery, its hallowed halls having clearly been infiltrated by the whackjob cult of Western self-loathing.

Remember this image of one of the highest moral stewards in Christendom decorating a hardline Muslim cleric as his cloaked wife is barely able to look on. For it embodies, in all its grimness, the moral suicide of the West, our wilful immolation of our traditions and beliefs to appease the false god of multiculturalism. In more serious times, the archbishop would have considered his / her position following a spiritual scandal as vast and nauseating as this. Let’s see what Mullally does.