The Makerfield by-election was seen as one of the most consequential in modern British history and, with reports that Andy Burnham intends to scrap planned reforms to Indefinite Leave to Remain (ILR), it is hard to argue otherwise.

The result last Thursday will not only give the UK a new prime minister, but could also mean up to 2.15million migrants who arrived between 2021 and the election of Keir Starmer – known as the ‘Boriswave’ – will soon be awarded permanent settlement, putting them on a pathway to British citizenship. A politician with a mandate of just under 25,000 votes is taking our country down a path that will have profound social, fiscal and democratic consequences.

Last year, home secretary Shabana Mahmood introduced modest proposals that would require care workers and their dependents who arrived during Johnson’s term to wait up to 15 years before obtaining ILR, with the baseline for other migrants increasing from five to 10 years. It was a long-overdue recognition that the last Conservative government’s immigration policies had led to an unprecedented spike in low-wage and low-skill migration.

Standing in a Red Wall seat, Burnham softly indicated that he supported the general gist of Mahmood’s plan. He also u-turned on his prior support for migrants to have immediate access to public funds on arrival, and said net migration needed to continue falling.

For an individual vying for the top job, this made perfect sense. Polling by More in Common found that 52 per cent of voters think the main reason immigrants come to the UK is to take advantage of welfare and the NHS. The vast majority of the British public do not support giving welfare to migrants.

But Burnham is no longer courting the support of ordinary Brits. The views and opinions of his Makerfield constituents were forgotten as soon as he entered the Avanti West Coast first-class lounge. His only guiding principle now is keeping the parliamentary Labour Party on side.

As soon as Mahmood’s proposals were first announced, an avalanche of criticism poured down from Labour backbenchers. The main line of attack was that these changes were ‘unfair’ after Britain had ‘promised’ migrants settlement after five years.

Quite when such a ‘promise’ was made by the British government is a mystery. It is also perverse for British politicians to hold a pledge made to foreign nationals as inviolable, while treating the repeated pledges made to the British electorate that mass migration will be brought to an end, and that public debt will be brought under control, as expendable.

As for the matter of fairness, is it really fair to expect overstretched taxpayers to stump up for yet more welfare spending? According to Mahmood, abandoning her reforms could cost up to £10 billion over the lifetimes of just this cohort of care workers and their dependants. And care workers are just one part of the Boriswave. Reform UK estimates that the lifetime cost of all those granted ILR between 2026 and 2030 could amount to £154 billion.

Indeed, some senior Labour figures, including Emily Thornberry, have all but acknowledged that Boriswave migrants obtaining settlement is going to cost a pretty penny, but that we should proceed down this path because to do otherwise would push them into destitution. Saying the quiet part out loud, Thornberry claimed in March this year that over half of migrant children are living in relative poverty. The only remedy, it seems, would be to award their low-earning parents the right to stay in Britain permanently so that they can then claim benefits.

Ironically, granting permanent settlement would actually negate the very justification that was used for the Boriswave in the first place – namely, that the care sector would collapse without vast numbers of migrants. After all, once an individual receives ILR, they have the right to work in whichever sector they wish or even to not work at all. No longer are they required to do the jobs that Britons supposedly don’t want to do. Instead, low-skilled foreign nationals would be free to compete for jobs at the lower end of the labour market, in sectors where there are no shortages. This would be an unmitigated disaster for the roughly one million young people in Britain not in education, employment or training, who would then find it even harder to enter the workplace.

It is hard to overstate how long the damage of Burnham’s embrace of the Boriswave would last. Even before the next General Election, hundreds of thousands of ‘Burnham-Settlers’ could have moved on to obtain British citizenship, putting them beyond the reach of even Reform’s proposal to scrap ILR. At which point, given the cost to the exchequer, we may start to see proposals to denaturalise large numbers of British citizens.

Andy Burnham, before even assuming office, may very well have sowed the seeds of his own downfall. He was elected by traditional Labour voters still hoping there was a politician on their side. For him to suddenly turn into a co-conspirator of Boris Johnson would put him on the path to electoral damnation.

Rob Bates is the research director at the Centre for Migration Control.

In May, it emerged that a group of Sheffield schools had devised a set of ‘anti-racism’ lesson plans. Among other things, they encouraged teachers to educate children as young as seven to believe that white people are privileged because of the colour of their skin. They were also to inculcate the belief that while black people can be racially prejudiced, because they lack cultural power, they can’t be racist.

The existence of such racial-identitarian dogma in Sheffield is not a surprise. Like most local councils in the UK, Sheffield City Council is facing some enormous challenges. Housing is in short supply and the city itself is in debt for tens of millions of pounds. But over and over again, one challenge is apparently more urgent and pervasive than the rest: racism.

Take Sheffield council’s decision in 2020 to establish a Race Equality Commission to assess ‘the nature, extent, causes and impacts of racism and race inequality within the city’. Its chair, Kevin Hylton, a professor emeritus at Leeds Beckett University, handpicked 24 Sheffielders as race commissioners. ‘The diversity of this group was exceptional in terms of gender and ethnicity’, Hylton said. This was one way of describing the appointments. Only three of the 24 commissioners were white (two women, one man). In other words, 88 per cent of the commissioners were drawn from minorities who make up approximately just 20 per cent of Sheffield’s population. Talk about ‘exceptional’.

In 2022, the commission delivered its report and concluded that Sheffield was indeed racist. Not just slightly racist, but super racist. The council heard testimonies from people accusing every one of the city’s institutions – from education to crime and justice to business – of all types of discrimination: ‘institutional, structural, microaggression, direct, indirect, conscious and unconscious bias’. One expert witness even testified to the existence of invisible racism. ‘Yes, racism is there’, he said. ‘It’s just very hard to prove it, but you know for yourself because there’s a lot of unfairness.’

‘Racism and racial disparities remain significant’, Hylton wrote in the report’s foreword. He then called for ‘positive measures and improvements in organisations and among its citizenry’. Improvements among the citizenry? Like ‘anti-racism’ training in Sheffield schools, for instance.

Indeed, this anti-racist fanaticism has been injected into the education system. As we’ve seen in Sheffield, education programmes seeking to embed ‘racial literacy’ and ‘anti-racism’ into every institution have become the prisms through which teachers are encouraged to interpret children, classrooms and achievement. The logic is as crude as it is revealing: racial disparities are treated as proof of racism, and the remedy is to send teachers into classrooms to lecture small children about white privilege.

Of course, Sheffield is hardly an aberration. It is a local manifestation of a national obsession. The belief that schools must be ground zero for decolonisation efforts is widespread. Teachers must examine their own unconscious biases to create what are called ‘more equitable and inclusive learning spaces’. Advocates of this strategy promise that non-white students will be empowered by the acknowledgement of the structural barriers to their success.

The anti-racist training seen in some Sheffield schools is not mandatory in British schools. But it might as well be. The Department for Education allows schools to implement it, provided they adhere to guidelines on political impartiality. These guidelines, outlined in the Education Act 1996 and expanded upon in 2022, require that teaching does not promote partisan political views and that balanced views are presented on politically contentious issues. In practice, however, these guidelines are often vague and inconsistently applied. In the case of race and identity, they are often ignored by educators who insist ‘anti-racism’ is beyond politics altogether.

Far from being inclusive, anti-racism training often divides children into crude racial categories – oppressors or victims – and replaces the idea of individual moral character with collective racial identity. This is because it is informed by critical race theory (CRT), which claims race is a social construct invented by white people to preserve their privilege and supremacy. The result is that white children, regardless of their economic or social situation, are ‘privileged by virtue of being white’.

At the same time, non-white children are encouraged to see themselves as victims of a system rigged against them. The classroom becomes a battleground of racial grievance. While white-skinned people are the problem, everyone else is morally pure – unless, of course, you are East Asian and doing well. In that case, you become ‘white-adjacent’, a term used in social-justice discourse to describe non-white groups that align with white people enough to benefit from their privileges.

Despite CRT’s promise of liberation from power structures, its only real purpose is chaining young people to perpetual victimhood. Yet its proponents cannot see this. They do not worry about its miasma of contradictions: that race does not exist, but it also explains the meaning of life; that race is a social construct with no biological basis, yet everything must be seen through a racial lens; that race is supposedly meaningless, though white children must constantly reflect on their whiteness so as not to let it overtake them.

To point all of this out invites outrage from the usual suspects. When then equalities minister Kemi Badenoch addressed parliament in 2020 to argue that teaching white students about inherited guilt was unacceptable, she came under fire from teachers. This is because many believe that, without anti-racist training, their white students will grow up to become the next generation of oppressors.

All of this leaves us to wonder: if anti-racist educators truly believe that race is a social construct, why do they not simply deconstruct it? Why not teach children that race is morally meaningless, and that they should judge one another as individuals? Until we as a society stop telling people that the organising principle of their lives is race, I’m afraid any hope of actual ‘progress’ will remain a fantasy.

On Tuesday, 283 MPs voted to proceed with a medical experiment that seeks to recruit some of the most vulnerable children in Britain, including those in care. They did so despite being repeatedly warned that injecting healthy children with puberty blockers could damage bone density, impair cognitive ability and lead to infertility.

Despite the best efforts of the Conservatives – who forced parliament to hold the vote – and campaigners such as detransitioner Keira Bell, the NHS-backed Pathways Trial will almost certainly now go ahead. This in itself is astonishing, considering that it was paused in February after the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency raised concerns about the potential harm to the more than 200 children – some as young as 10 – who will be subjected to the trial. It is also pointless, given that NHS trusts continue to hold unpublished data that could answer many of the questions the trial is supposed to answer.

Conservative MP Caroline Johnson, a former consultant paediatrician, opened the debate. She asked Labour’s beleaguered and slightly confused-looking new health minister, James Murray, whether he ‘is aware of new evidence allowing clinicians to work out confidently which children will persist with the trans identity at 11 and which will not?’. She continued: ‘We need to think about the risk involved in the treatment, and whether it is worth the benefits that they will purportedly receive’.

Johnson drew attention to other serious concerns. Among them is the fact that 12-year-olds enrolled in the trial will be asked to complete questionnaires about whether they have engaged in oral sex during the previous year, ostensibly to assess their understanding of the impact that puberty blockers may have on future sexual function. They will also be paid for filling out the questionnaires. Murray opted not to address this point.

Throughout the debate, Murray hid behind the ermine-fringed authority of Baroness Hilary Cass, the paediatrician who recommended a trial as part of her review of gender-identity services for children, published in 2024. He solemnly informed the chamber that he had ‘struggled with the profound challenges this subject raises’. Yet when Conservative MP Rebecca Paul reminded him of the doubts he had professed about the trial only the day before the vote, his struggle appeared to be with remaining in the chamber, which he promptly left.

The authority on which ministers continue to rely has itself become increasingly controversial. Earlier this week, Cass defended the trial in an interview with the BBC, warning that 11-year-old girls are presenting to clinics having already taken testosterone, a claim repeated by Murray. One might have expected such a revelation to prompt calls for police action against those supplying these hormones to children. Instead, Cass argued that this was evidence that these children should be enrolled in a trial of puberty blockers. As Johnson explained to her colleagues in the House of Commons, ‘we would not give children cocaine on the basis that they wanted it and would get it illegally otherwise’.

Cass’s task of reviewing gender-identity services for children in the UK was an unenviable one. She stepped into no man’s land in search of evidence, with a target on her back and shots coming from all sides. But when the smoke cleared and the Cass Review landed, it was clear to anyone with eyes that the war was somewhat one-sided. She concluded that, ‘the evidence base underpinning medical and surgical interventions in this clinical area is remarkably weak’, and found ‘insufficient and / or inconsistent evidence’ regarding the effects of puberty suppression on psychological wellbeing, cognitive development and bone health.

To anyone whose brain has been spared the rot of trans ideology, this was no more surprising than discovering that Ozempic harms anorexic children. But it took someone of Cass’s stature to force the government to confront reality. Even those of us whose expectations of officialdom are calibrated somewhere between ‘low’ and ‘abysmal’ assumed no ethics board would approve a trial of puberty blockers. For her pains, Cass became public enemy No1 to trans activists, inside and outside parliament.

It is hard to escape the feeling that the paediatrician has been knobbled. Panicked by the prospect of children buying hormones online, she has backed a poorly designed and potentially dangerous experiment. Even trans-cheerleading rag PinkNews is supporting Cass on Pathways.

There is nothing more depressing than the politics of defeat, of managed decline. Giving distressed children puberty blockers because they might otherwise buy hormones from dodgy providers online is no different from giving girls who are being sexually exploited the pill to prevent pregnancy. What is happening is a crime, and yet, just as with the vulnerable children exploited by rape gangs, it is one the state is prepared to accommodate if the alternative is confronting its own prejudice.

The proper response to children obtaining powerful drugs illegally is not to provide those drugs under official supervision. It is to stop the people supplying them, protect the children involved and enforce the law. That ministers now present a clinical trial as the only realistic alternative is an admission not of compassion, but of failure.

Jo Bartosch is co-author of Pornocracy. Order it here.

The publication of an NHS investigation into a GP clinic in Brighton deserves to be a watershed moment in the never-ending scandal of so-called gender medicine.

The findings, published last month, concern the WellBN practice – and they are excoriating. According to the investigation, 78 young people and children – some as young as 12 – at the clinic’s ‘Trans Health Hub’ were given puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones from January 2023 to December last year. In 22 cases, gender treatment was given to patients without even a face-to-face consultation. Disturbingly, the report found that 53 of the 78 patients might have had neurodevelopmental issues. The NHS guidance formulated in the wake of the Cass Review says that puberty blockers should never be prescribed, outside of a clinical trial. As of March 2026, NHS England no longer prescribes cross-sex hormones to under-18s, and has never recommended prescribing them to anyone under-16.

Yet perhaps the most striking aspect of this scandal is not what happened inside a Brighton GP practice. It is how many people knew enough to raise concerns long before the NHS finally acted. According to the report, NHS Sussex was aware something was amiss at WellBN as early as September 2024.

In fact, authorities should have acted even sooner. Last year, Hannah Barnes wrote in the New Statesman that the General Medical Council and NHS England had concerns over WellBN going back to 2019. Barnes wrote that, if the investigation ultimately concluded there had been malpractice, ‘none of the organisations responsible for protecting these young people and ensuring they receive safe care will be able to say it could not have been prevented’. Now, the NHS has confirmed that those warnings deserved to be taken seriously all along.

One of the most revealing details concerns WellBN’s use of an ‘informed consent’ model. Under this approach, the patient – usually a minor – is treated as the expert on themselves. Legitimate mental-health assessments are sidelined. The role of the clinician becomes less about investigation and diagnosis, and more about facilitating the patient’s stated wishes.

It is this kind of lax thinking that has characterised so much of the trans debate in Britain. Traditionally, adults had responsibilities precisely because children were not expected to navigate every complex question alone. This was particularly the case when it came to medically ‘transitioning’, which involves medication and sometimes surgery that will carry lifelong consequences for those who choose to undergo it.

Parents, teachers and doctors were expected to exercise judgment, ask questions and sometimes challenge assumptions. In the gender-identity field, however, questioning increasingly came to be regarded as harmful. Affirmation was seen as kindness, while scepticism was seen as suspicion.

The result was not merely a lack of scrutiny. It was a culture in which scrutiny itself became suspect. Brighton offers perhaps the clearest example of this.

Long before the NHS investigation into WellBN, parents had raised concerns about local gender-identity practices in the area. Some alleged that schools were facilitating the social transitioning of children – that is, letting them adopt the pronouns, dress code and a name fitting the opposite sex – without any parental involvement. Others questioned the influence of activist organisations working in schools. Some warned about pathways that appeared to steer vulnerable children towards medicalisation.

Whatever anyone thought about those concerns, they were plainly safeguarding questions that deserved to be examined. Instead, critics often found themselves represented as the problem. In 2023, Labour councillor Bella Sankey accused local parents of spreading ‘baseless smears’ when they were concerned about the fact that their daughter’s school had allowed her to use chestbinders without their permission.

This pattern has become familiar across Britain. Institutions increasingly retreat behind process, guidance and procedure. Questions are acknowledged but never really answered. Concerns are noted but never seriously investigated. The appearance of engagement replaces the reality of scrutiny.

One parent quoted by Barnes captured the problem with WellBN perfectly: ‘The tragedy isn’t that nobody knew. The warnings were known, the prescribing was celebrated, and institutional curiosity went missing precisely when it was needed most.’

That observation should trouble anyone concerned with safeguarding. Because the real lesson of WellBN is not that there was too little compassion. If anything, everyone involved believed they were acting compassionately.

Many questions remain. The NHS report tells us what happened at one GP practice. It does not tell us how so many children arrived there. It does not explain the role played by schools, local authorities or activist groups. It does not explain why so many adults acted like rabbits in the headlights, frozen in fear, seemingly unable to ask obvious questions.

The WellBN scandal should prompt a reckoning not only with one clinic, but also with an entire institutional culture. A culture in which scepticism was treated as hostility, parental concerns were too easily dismissed, and curiosity itself became something to tiptoe around.

The children at the centre of this story deserved better than. Some of them – now adults with profound medical problems – are likely to ask why on Earth their schools sent them along a classroom-to-clinic pathway.

They deserved adults willing to ask difficult questions before the harm was done. They deserved a system that prioritised the interests of children and young people, instead of the interests of trans activists. They deserved so much better.