This is a bottle of Rimmel’s Oh My Gold nail polish, which I’m currently sporting. My five-year-old son likes it too, because nail polish is fun and fun is important. So when he asked for some on his own nails last night I was happy to oblige.

This morning, he asked me to take it off again because he’s going to a sports camp where “the big boys will notice and say ‘what are you wearing nail polish for? That’s for girls!’ and pick on me.” So we got the nail polish remover and scrubbed every last bit off again.

Five years old and he already knows the rules, and that he’ll be punished for breaking them.

It makes me sad, as it did when my daughter was told aged four that history and dinosaurs are not for girls, and as it did a year later when she was told that girls couldn’t play with dragons because unicorns, not dragons, are for girls. We’re policing the gender of imaginary creatures now, it seems.

These attitudes are learnt, of course. They’re passed down from other children, and from parents. So at an age when children should be expressing themselves more, experiencing more, exploring more, learning more, we’re already trying to put limits on all of those things.

In a world of infinite colours, we’re telling them to choose just one.

Frances Ryan, in The Guardian:

Medics often use life expectancy as a barometer of the health of a nation and by official measures, Britain is getting sicker. For the first time in 100 years, Britons are dying earlier, leading a team of specialists to meet at University College London this month to investigate it.

The UK now has the worst health trends in western Europe, with experts stating that austerity is a major factor. This is no coincidence considering that consecutive Conservative-led governments chose far deeper cuts in the wake of the 2008 global crash than many other European countries, opting for dramatic reductions in funding for anything from meals on wheels, to NHS spending and social security.

Even babies are not immune to such political failings. The infant mortality rate in England and Wales is rising after more than a century of continuous improvement. As child poverty grows, the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health estimates infant mortality rates could be 140% higher here than in comparable wealthy countries by 2030.

It’s hardly news to discover that a prospective Tory prime minister is a terrible human being, but even by their usual standards the current crop have revealed themselves to be particularly unpleasant.

Speaking to the media yesterday, Esther McVey followed in the footsteps of Andrea Leadsom by taking the side of the homophobic protestors outside the Birmingham primary school: when it comes to equality, “parents know best”. Meanwhile Dominic Raab announced that he didn’t want to “make it easier” for trans kids to be themselves.

The kind of people who scream at five year olds vote in significant numbers, so McVey will happily throw the vulnerable minority of LGBT parents and children under the bus to get those votes. Trans kids don’t vote at all and their parents aren’t a significant electoral force, so Raab is happy to dog-whistle to the anti-trans and religious brigade about the invented spectre of children transitioning. Once more for those at the back: trans children don’t get hormones or surgery in the UK; that isn’t under review.

I’m no fan of the Conservatives, but some of them deserve some credit for their approach to LGBT rights in recent years: David Cameron ignored the majority of his own MPs to get equal marriage passed in 2013, and the Conservatives have also attempted to bring gender recognition in line with international best practice (an attempt that was done badly and turned into a disaster for trans people, but that’s for another post). Penny Mordaunt in particular has been a positive voice in government for LGBT people.

But the Conservatives were also the party of Section 28.

As the equal marriage vote demonstrated, the majority of Conservative MPs are not in favour of equal rights for LGBT people.

Nadine Dorries claimed equal marriage was “a policy which has been pursued by the metro elite gay activists”. Liam Fox said it was “a form of social engineering” and voted against extending equal marriage to Forces personnel stationed abroad. David Davies is a vocal anti-trans activist with a truly appalling voting record on LGBT issues (and inevitably, on women’s rights too). Of the 21 MPs who voted to oppose inclusive relationship in schools this year, 12 were Tory (plus 7 of their DUP allies and 1 independent. Just one Labour MP joined them).

Their friends in the press aren’t exactly LGBT-friendly either, and the most vocally anti-trans newspapers are the ones most read by Conservative voters and the hard core of Conservative party members who will select the next Prime Minister.

Most politicians would happily sell their own mothers for power, and looking across the Atlantic it’s clear that pandering to bigots and Murdoch is an effective way of gaining that power. Who cares if that means making a vulnerable minority’s lives worse? Given the choice between protecting people and gaining power, they’ll choose power every time.

For too many Conservatives, LGBT people’s lives simply don’t matter.

The ongoing protests against inclusive education in Birmingham continue after the latest talks broke down. With some irony, it seems the anger against “no outsiders” is being whipped up by outsiders. Those outsiders are spreading lies and deliberately stirring up hatred.

Nafir Afzal is the person with the unenviable job of mediator.

“I’ve looked at the curriculum, there is nothing in the curriculum that is LGBT specific. There is nothing about gay sex.

“I’ve seen people walking around outside of that school with stuff that they have downloaded from the internet suggesting this is on the curriculum.

“This is what’s being taught to their children. It’s a lie. And this is what I’m dealing with.”

These aggressive protests, which have left teachers and children in tears, follow a pattern we’ve seen many times: religious zealots, mainly men, spreading hatred.

“What the hell are they doing outside screaming at five year olds? What are they doing?

The people doing the screaming in this particular case are mainly Muslim. The ones doing identical screaming in America and Canada, where hundreds of parents have also protested inclusive education in increasingly angry ways, are Christian.

What both groups have in common is religious zealotry. They don’t represent other people of their communities, let alone of their faiths; they’re hijacking faith, using it as a vehicle to try and force their regressive, bigoted ideologies on the wider population. Where there is doubt or division, they amplify it. Where there is misunderstanding, they add to it. Where there’s a fire, they pour petrol on it.

This is not a local issue. It’s a global one. All over the world, religious extremists are pushing to turn back the clock in secular societies. Those societies keep the church and the state separate for good reasons, and extremists want to change that. And politicians aren’t responding quickly enough, or clearly enough.

Some of the bigots are white, some brown, some Muslim, some Christian. All should be resisted.

Faith is for churches. Schools are for facts.

Live by social media, die by losing your social media accounts.