The Tavistock is a national scandal

How noble of the British Library to have apologised to the family of the late Poet Laureate Ted Hughes for having identified him as a beneficiary of slavery. The library’s scrupulous and deranged researchers had unearthed evidence that Hughes may have been a distant relative of a man called Nicholas Ferrar, born in 1592, and that Ferrar had some early involvement in the slave trade. Ferrar died childless so the precise link was not known, but it was enough for Liz Jolly’s maniacs to besmirch the man.

Ms Jolly is chief librarian and the woman who said that racism was ‘a creation of white people’ — along with body odour, sin, cholera, poverty, werewolves and mosquitos, presumably. We are an inventive lot, after all. Covid and Scotch eggs may be occupying the minds of most of the nation right now, but it is comforting to know that the projects of the post-rational left are still being eagerly pursued in institutions which you pay for.

However, a temporary halt may now be called to one of the most ludicrous and egregious of those projects — the attempt to ensure that as many children as possible transition to a gender ‘different to the one they were assigned at birth’. The high court adjudication in the case of Keira Bell should ensure that much, even if there is to be an appeal.

Ms Bell, aged 23, was treated at the Tavistock Clinic’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) back when she was 16 and 17 and of a mind to become a bloke. She was given hormone blockers and cross-sex hormones to facilitate her re-invention.

Latterly, she has come to deeply abhor what happened to her and insists she was insufficiently mature to have given informed consent, had been treated as a guinea pig, and had not been subjected to an adequate psychological assessment.