When you hear the word ‘Rochdale’ probably the first things you will probably think of will be the host of child safeguarding problems associated with this local authority. These problems include decades of depredation from Islamic Rape Gangs and for older readers, the actions of local nonce MP Cyril Smith and the gruesome tale of how local social services staff damaged families after the social workers getting sucked into the myths about Satanic Ritual Abuse. The local (Labour since 2011) council do not have the best reputation for ensuring children’s safety.

But, on at least one occasion, Rochdale Borough Council has decided to make a positive decision with regards child safeguarding by banning a series of Drag Queen Storytime performances in their libraries. For the record I have no problem with drag or drag acts and in their place, for an audience of adults, they are great but I cannot see what benefit, apart from indoctrinating kids into gender ideology, comes from having drag acts read to children.

Rochdale Council gave no reason for the cancellation of the performance at their libraries but I suspect that they must have got nervous at the negative press coverage and increasingly vocal demonstrations by parents and others against the various Drag Queen Story Hour events. I also suspect that with Rochdale’s appalling reputation for failing the children in their area the council decided that they didn’t need the additional bad publicity of libraries being surrounded by both pro and anti Drag Queen story hour demonstrators.

Although I cannot and will not condone the threats of violence that various nutcases have made to those organising DQSH events and the venues that host them and wish to add that I disagree with some of the groups that have become involved in this, I’m glad to see that on the whole there is a peaceful pushback against Drag Queen Story Hour events. I’m glad not only because I believe that these events are age inappropriate for young children per se but also because these events have become linked in people’s minds with grooming children to accept scientifically baseless ideologies such as those promulgated by the cult of trans. I am pleased to see some councils (a DQSH event was also cancelled in Brighton) U-turning on this issue as these events are of dubious merit for the children who go to them and have too often ended up with public libraries being turned into battlegrounds for two mutually incompatible groups to fight on.

When this all simmers down and the councils realise that hiring drag queens to read to children is not what the public really want or need from their libraries, there should be some journalistic, parliamentary or other investigations into how Britain’s libraries became so owned by the adherents of the cult of trans that they thought that DQSH was a good idea. Someone somewhere, maybe people quite senior in the management of various local libraries must has thought that this DQSH was a good idea and decided to arrogantly push it onto the public. It is quite possible that those who made the decision were not qualified professional adult or specialist children’s librarians but were non qualified general management types who might have been overly influenced by groups like Libraries Connected who appear to have been very active in pushing DQSH. It would be helpful to know who made these decisions in order that there is never again such a public relations disaster for British libraries as DQSH has been.