The right’s culture war over prostate cancer screening is damaging trust in medicine | Polly Toynbee

The decision not to test all men and only screen the most at risk, including black men, is fact-based. Yet it’s been called ‘two-tier’ – and labelled as misandry

If the country seems to be slipping away from reason and trust in science, blame usually falls on modern phenomena such as social media and its fantastical influencers. Or on the US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr’s bizarre anti-vaccine, anti-fluoride, anti-evidence lunacy. But campaigns against the UK national screening committee’s decision to limit prostate cancer testing have been run by British bastions of the sort laying claim to “common sense”. They include two Tory ex-prime ministers, David Cameron and Rishi Sunak (who see themselves as sensibles, unlike Boris Johnson and Liz Truss), joined by their Tory/Reform media, especially the Mail and the Telegraph, plus a host of distinguished campaigners such as Stephen Fry, fount of QI knowledge.

The national screening committee (NSC) has for a long time resisted a call for universal testing of all men for prostate cancer, though it kills 12,000 men a year in the UK. I was on the committee in the 1990s, and it was besieged by demands for screening for prostate cancer and numerous other conditions. These were often refused for unreasonable cost, but this decision is about harm to men, not about money.

Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist