Lara Prendergast

New powers to tackle the huge growth in 'legal' highs are set to be introduced. Dame Sally Davies, the chief medical officer, is said to be pushing for the most radical move, a blanket ban on all psychoactive substances. My heart sinks. Do those at the top of government really think that a blanket ban will solve the problem? The evidence doesn't suggest so: prohibition very rarely reduces drug use. So why do they think that an even more extreme level of prohibition will help? New varieties of 'legal' high will be invented and put on sale on the internet. Many of these drugs are already imported from foreign websites, and it's hard to see how this ban can stop this from happening.

The Department of Education has published a damning report today which suggests there was an ‘aggressive Islamist agenda’ pursued in a number of the ‘Trojan horse’ schools in Birmingham. Peter Clarke, a former counter-terror chief, published the report, which found evidence of a coordinated plan to impose strict Islamic teaching on pupils. Michael Gove, the former Education Secretary commissioned the report.

In the Independent this week, Yvette Cooper suggested that British boys should grow up as ‘confident feminists’. They need to have lessons in feminism to help them learn how to treat women, she argued. But school shouldn’t be a place where you indoctrinate pupils to believe a particular ideology. And feminism, for all its admirable achievements in the 20th century, is an ideology. Compulsory sex education in which boys are taught to be feminists is beyond silly. By all means explain that they shouldn’t go round lifting up girls' skirts for a peek, but it’s possible to do this without telling them they must call themselves feminists. They might not like that kind of prescription. Schoolboys do tend to be a bit… truculent.

Uh oh. The ‘all-women shortlist’ is again being touted as a good idea for the Conservatives, this time by Nicky Morgan, the new women’s minister. When asked about using shortlists to increase the number of female MPs, she told a Mumsnet chat: ‘I do think the big issue is we just aren't getting enough women coming forward (which is an issue for all Parties). I think we need to see where we end up in 2015 and if we are still struggling to get more women MPs then no option is off the table.’ In response, a senior Conservative has said that quotas are ‘categorically not an option’. Why can’t people like Morgan see that an all-women shortlist (or any form of social engineering) is a bad idea?

Oh come on internet. Pull yourself together. Michael Fabricant has tweeted about punching a woman and people are going mad. It’s a silly thing to tweet, but does anyone doubt that? It’s simply hyperbole, flounce, floridity. That’s sometimes what it takes to get noticed on Twitter. Plenty of people are guilty of this trope. Let’s not pay them too much attention. But let’s not also drag this out into a discussion about violence against women. Victims of abuse must find this sort of storm very frustrating – I imagine most men who actually punch women probably don’t tweet about it.

Black cab drivers are striking in London today because they are angry that Uber – a rival taxi service supported by Google – is undercutting their market. They will argue that Uber’s drivers are using a smartphone app to calculate fares, despite it being illegal for private vehicles to be fitted with taximeters. I couldn’t care less about the intricacies of this argument (the High Court can figure that one out). All I care about is getting home safely and it not costing too much. Uber offers me that. I’m wary of jumping into unlicensed minicabs. As those spooky tube adverts remind you, ‘If your minicab's not booked, it's just a stranger's car’. But with Uber, they are booked.

Kirstie Allsopp was yesterday quoted in the Telegraph saying that women should shun university in favour of buying a flat and having babies. If she had a daughter, she would give her the following advice: ‘Don't go to university. Start work straight after school, stay at home, save up your deposit – I'll help you, let's get you into a flat. And then we can find you a nice boyfriend and you can have a baby by the time you're 27.  ‘Women are being let down by the system. We should speak honestly and frankly about fertility and the fact it falls off a cliff when you're 35. We should talk openly about university and whether going when you're young, when we live so much longer, is really the way forward.

It's fashionable nowadays to claim that young people in Britain don't know how to have a good time. There's certainly plenty of evidence to suggest we’re avoiding the drugs our parents' generation got their kicks from. Fraser Nelson discussed this in The Spectator last November, arguing that Britain's youth were becoming more abstemious: 'Marijuana, LSD, speed, cocaine — surveys show that every drug you can think of is plunging in popularity amongst the young. The proportion of under-20s who say they have taken drugs in the past month has halved over the last decade. Only two drugs are on the up and both are legal: Ritalin and Modafinil, stimulants that can power students through ten-hour study sessions. 'It's a long way from Woodstock.

Louisa Peacock of The Telegraph's Wonder Women desk has written of how a doorman who refused her entry to a London restaurant because she was not wearing smart enough clothes has lost his job. Peacock appears to think this a victory for the crusaders against #everydaysexism. I can't agree. Ignoring the fact that the man probably wouldn't have been sacked had Peacock not been a journalist, this piece sets a very worrying precedent. Louisa Peacock has mistaken a minor grievance for a political point, and a man has lost his job. Peacock did not intend it to be so; but that is what has happened.

In a report released today, the All Party Parliamentary Group on Skin (APPGS) outline their recommendations to the Department of Health on extending sunbed regulation. The report comes at a time when rates of malignant melanoma, the most dangerous form of skin cancer, are five times higher in the UK than they were in the 1970s. According to Cancer Research UK, the dramatic rise can be attributed partly to the rise of package holidays, the fashion for a ‘healthy’ tan, and a boom in sunbed use. Increased rates of melanoma Cancer Research states that sunbed use raises the chance of developing a melanoma by nearly 59 per cent in first-time users under the age of 35.