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.

The independent ‘Rape Gang Inquiry’, set up by Restore Britain leader Rupert Lowe, published its report last week. So did it add anything fresh to our collective understanding of grooming-gang activity or shed new light on the factors driving this decades-long, nationwide scourge?

Credit should certainly be given to the inquiry for thrusting grooming-gang activity, formally known as group-localised child sexual exploitation (GLCSE), back into the spotlight. And the survivors who contributed their testimonies to the inquiry – describing the torture, abuse and exploitation they endured – are deserving of the utmost admiration.

Furthermore, Restore’s inquiry has at least injected some urgency into proceedings. The UK government’s own national statutory inquiry into grooming-gang activity – reluctantly being held by the Labour government after it was recommended by Baroness Louise Casey in her national audit – is moving at a glacial pace. Restore has reminded us that Britain needs to face up to these horrific, unspeakable crimes against some of the most vulnerable and exposed members of our society, and explore the institutional mismanagement and neglect that allowed it to happen.

However, the report has not gone down as well as its authors may have hoped – even among those who have a proven track record of highlighting the horrors of grooming-gang criminality. Much of this criticism stems from the nature of the inquiry. It already had no statutory powers to compel witnesses to attend and provide evidence under oath. And it compounded these limitations by proceeding with no clearly defined objectives or ‘terms of reference’.

The report itself provides little in the way of fresh insight. It fails to dig into the scale of this nationwide epidemic or explore the societal, cultural and economic drivers of grooming-gang activity. Instead, the report is overly reliant on the victims’ admittedly harrowing testimonies. These then form the basis for what often amounts to pseudo-intellectual analysis. Much of the report reads more like punditry than a genuine examination of how these vile paedophilic crimes have been allowed to take place over decades.

The report is simply not a credible piece of research. Some of it is closer to anti-Muslim slop. There is an entire chapter dedicated to the ‘influence of Islam’ in the context of grooming-gang activity. It is true, as academics Kish Bhatti-Sinclair and Charles Sutcliffe argue in their 2020 paper on GLCSE (which was not cited at all in the rape-gang inquiry report), that Muslims dominate grooming-gang prosecutions. But they clearly show that it is specifically Pakistani Muslims originating from the Mirpur district of Azad Kashmir who comprise the vast majority of perpetrators. As they put it in their analysis of GLCSE prosecutions in local areas, ‘the proportion of the local population of Pakistani origin is more powerful in explaining the level of GLCSE than the Muslim proportion’. By the same token, the proportion of Bangladeshi-origin people (overwhelmingly Sunni Muslim) in an area had no effect on the level of GLCSE, in their analysis.

While it may be tempting for some on the radical right to exaggerate the role of Islam in the context of grooming-gang activity, it doesn’t do them any favours. The tight-knit, biraderi-style multi-generational kinship networks (reinforced by cousin marriage) and the patriarchal clan structures dominant within certain British-Pakistani communities seem to have played a far greater role than religion. These kinship and clan structures provide the bonds of secrecy and mutual protection that allow such large grooming gangs to operate undetected.

It is also somewhat baffling that Bradford is barely mentioned in the report. It should have been a case study in its own right, especially since previous local investigations into grooming-gang activity in the city have been threadbare at best. What needs to be thoroughly investigated is not only how these child-abuse networks operate within communities, but also how they were allowed to do so by public institutions – including local councils, police forces, schools, social services and safeguarding partnerships.

Tellingly, grooming-gang convictions involving non-Muslim criminal enterprises receive no mention whatsoever. Hence the exclusion of the Romanian grooming gang jailed last October for raping and sexually abusing 10 women in flats across Dundee in Scotland.

The Rape Gang Inquiry was a golden opportunity for fresh and hard-hitting insights on grooming-gang activity. It had the potential to be a serious and illuminating piece of work. Unfortunately, as someone who wanted this to be the case, the report has proven a profound disappointment.

Rakib Ehsan is the author of Beyond Grievance: What the Left Gets Wrong about Ethnic Minorities, which is available to order on Amazon.

Which Andy Burnham walks into Westminster? The Blairite centrist? The European Remainer? The man cheered on by uber-liberal luvvies like Hugh Grant and Carol Vorderman? The Guardian’s coverage of the Makerfield by-election, and of its new great white liberal hope, has been saccharine sweet. It is probably just as well the people of Makerfield do not read it – I am not sure what they would make of the praise.

Will Burnham do what so many Labour MPs have done before: use working-class votes to get to Westminster and never look back? Or will he be true to his acceptance speech in the early hours of 20 June, when he promised Makerfield would not be a ‘stepping stone’ but a ‘touchstone’? His ‘Makerfield test’, he said, would mean fairness for the places Westminster has neglected.

During the by-election, Burnham carefully courted Makerfield – a large, predominantly white, working-class area on the edge of Greater Manchester. Its people work in supermarkets, care homes and warehouses. This is the Red Wall: old Labour country, hollowed out by the closure of coal mines, engineering works and textile factories. Makerfield represents the English working class left out of the national conversation about who and what this country is for.

I know places like Makerfield because I know Ashfield in Nottinghamshire, where I was born and raised. It has the same story: deindustrialised, struggling to get by, and overwhelmingly Leave-voting in 2016. Ashfield voted Labour because it was working class, until people realised Labour was no longer for them. Like so many Red Wall constituencies, they learned that the party used their votes to send its favourites to Westminster, only to ignore them as soon as they took their seats in parliament.

Ashfield stopped voting Labour in 2019, backing local man Lee Anderson, who moved from Labour to the Tories and then to Reform UK in 2024. It now has a Reform MP and Reform councillors, alongside some independents. The message is clear: Ashfield has left Labour behind. Just over a month ago, when Reform replaced every Labour member on the Wigan council, Makerfield looked to be heading the same way.

So what does the ‘Makerfield test’ actually mean inside a Labour Party now dominated by liberal, middle-class, wealthy voters, who would not give the people of Makerfield the steam off their piss? Can it survive when the interests of the deindustrialised Red Wall working class are so often the opposite of Labour’s new electoral base?

The British Electoral study says Labour’s voter core has shifted towards higher-income, middle-class and highly educated voters. Its study, analysed by The Economist, showed a profound political realignment: the old pattern of the working-class voting Labour and the middle-class voting Conservative has been turned on its head. Labour’s support has collapsed among voters whose household income is under £30,000.

This is not just about income or education. It is about priorities. If Burnham becomes prime minister – and it is all but certain he will – whose priorities will the Makerfield test serve?

On the cost of living, Burnham has room to manoeuvre. Most people agree housing is too expensive and food inflation needs tackling. But energy is different. Apply the Makerfield test to Ed Miliband’s Net Zero zealotry and the commonsense outlook of the deindustrialised working class would tell him that the promise of well-paid ‘green jobs’ is a fantasy. As it turns out, there are no ‘green jobs’ for the people who kept Britain’s lights on for generations – only crippling energy prices and creeping poverty.

Then there is the small-boats crisis. In Red Wall communities, illegal immigration represents a deep unfairness: more than 40,000 undocumented men have arrived so far this year, a figure that will inevitably explode over the summer months, when illegal immigration is at its highest. They will live off the taxpayer, while working people struggle to get by – no amount of middle-class Labour voters shouting ‘racist’ changes that. To these communities, it isn’t only unfair – it represents the visible loss of control, and the blatant disregard of the one wish they have expressed in election after election.

Burnham claims to have a story about Britain – who we are and who we can be. But if that story asks the Red Wall working class to swallow the priorities of the urban, city-dwelling middle class, then he isn’t selling a story, just another stitch-up.

The Makerfield test will not be passed by slogans, selfies and least of all applause from the Guardian. It will be passed only if Andy Burnham is prepared to choose the people who sent him to Westminster over the people waiting there to claim him.

Lisa McKenzie is a working-class academic.