Labour's taste for biological extremism is both creepy and dangerous

The Herald Scotland

23-05-2025

The past should be learned from, and viewed as we view our youth: full of mistakes we won't repeat.
The future should be approached like a tightrope walker: slowly inching forward in case haste tips us to our death.
Nowhere is this more true than in the field of technology and science. In years gone by, should we not have been much more cautious in what we did with the power of the atom?
Would we still give free rein to the internet as we did in the 1990s? Would we claim today that social media is the saviour of democracy as we did in the 2010s?
If caution should have been engaged then, should caution not be engaged now? The notion that technology always means progress is a mere lie.
We should shiver at the Labour government's embrace of biology as a means not only to deal with seemingly intractable problems, but as a way of refashioning humanity in all its ugly reality.
Labour intends to use chemical castration on sexual offenders. Keir Starmer's government has already said it wants to use 'fat jabs' to get unemployed people into work. This biological extremism is deeply troubling.
After nearly 35 years as a reporter covering violent crime – including violent sexual crime against women and children – giving consideration to what happens to sexual offenders, rapists and paedophiles is quite a reach for me.
I confess that the only time murder crossed my mind was in the company of a paedophile. I was visiting a Scottish jail many years ago to report on conditions for prisoners.
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What you might call 'ordinary decent criminals' – your average thieves – were being kept in rather squalid surroundings, with the grim Victorian tradition of slopping out still routine.
On a segregated wing, however, I met sex offenders living in much better conditions, with toilets and TVs. I am not opposed to prisoners having access to television or bathrooms, but I wasn't impressed by the worst offenders receiving the best treatment.
I was taken into a cell to see the facilities. Inside was a sex offender. I asked the prisoner what crime he had committed. He started to claim that he'd been 'led astray' by his victim.
Before he could continue, the prison officer stopped him and said, 'Don't lie to the journalist, you were convicted of raping a four-year-old girl'.
I called the interview to a halt. I felt a wave of rage come over me so intense that I could imagine smashing the paedophile's face off his sink. Back on the wing, I told the prison officer how I felt. He said, 'How do you think I feel every day of my life?'
However, despite the visceral disgust I feel, chemical castration seems to open the door to some dreadful dystopia.
Initially, it will be voluntary down south, but Labour is already suggesting it becomes compulsory. We've just seen a man released after serving 38 years for a crime he didn't commit.
This is a government moving in a very creepy direction that's both frighteningly sci-fi, yet thoroughly medieval.
I oppose capital punishment as I believe the human body to be inviolable. The state must not sink to the depths of the criminal. We must not murder the murderer. The sex offender is jailed because he has violated another person's body. Nobody has the right to take my life but myself.
We cannot medicalise our way out of social problems or criminal problems. This invasive approach to the human body is, in truth, inhuman.
Nor can we ensure that chemically castrated prisoners will stop carrying out sexual offences. We know sexual violence is interwoven with power and control.
There have been cases where sexual offenders continue to harm women and children even after chemical castration in order to fulfil power fantasies.
The idea of injecting the unemployed with weight-loss drugs to get them back into work is simply grotesque.
Some who are poor and unemployed can only afford cheap junk food which causes them to gain weight. If we want to get people into work then create good jobs, don't subject them to experimentation.
Now couple all this with promises by Labour that artificial intelligence will be 'mainlined into the veins' of the nation.
In this case, the vow is metaphoric, not literal. But Starmer does wish to subject this country to a mass experiment in the use of AI as a tool of government.
We have seen already how AI simply replicates the biases of the humans who create it. So if a company has a history of selecting male, white candidates for jobs, then black applicants and women will be under-selected if AI is involved.
This embrace of 'science as god', of 'science as panacea', is dangerous. It speaks of a government incapable of coming up with policies to address the problems besetting us.
Science has no conscience. History proves that. Science matters deeply. It gives us the tools to make rational choices. But to lean on science as a crutch, to surrender our natural creativity and government responsibility to science, is to remove a large chunk of what makes us human.