Labour has also rejected European Commission’s proposal which would have allowed young people to live, work or study in the bloc

Rishi Sunak has rejected an EU offer to strike a post-Brexit deal to allow young Britons to live, study or work in the bloc for up to four years.

The prime minister declined the European Commission’s surprise proposal of a youth mobility scheme for those aged between 18 and 30 on Friday, after Labour had already knocked back the suggestion back on Thursday night – while noting it would “seek to improve the UK’s working relationship with the EU within our red lines”.

We’re keen to hear what people make of the proposal to resume freedom of movement between the EU and UK for young people aged between 18 and 30

The European Commission has proposed opening negotiations with the UK to allow mobility enjoyed before Brexit to millions of young people in a major concession.

Under the envisaged agreement, EU and UK citizens aged between 18 and 30 would be able to stay for up to four years in the destination country, the European Commission said in a statement.

While most who wrote in favoured some sort of action to reduce the damage caused by tobacco, some warned about the UK becoming a ‘nanny state’

Dozens of people have shared with the Guardian how they feel about Rishi Sunak’s tobacco and vapes bill , which aims to create the UK’s first smoke-free generation. The proposed legislation would not ban smoking outright, but ensure that anyone born after 1 January 2009 would be banned from buying cigarettes.

About half of respondents said they were in favour of the proposed ban, at least in principle, primarily due to the strain that smoking puts on the NHS. Many of them, however, questioned its enforceability and whether there would be unwelcome consequences.

Government under pressure to respond to Cass review which questioned medical basis for prescribing puberty blockers

There is no case for closing Scotland’s only clinic to offer treatment to gender-questioning young people, Humza Yousaf has said, amid calls for the Scottish government to halt the service in the wake of the Cass review.

The Sandyford clinic, based in Glasgow, offers a range of services including emergency contraception, abortion and support for sexual assault victims as well as transgender healthcare.

Commons leader known to have reservations about PM’s plan, as Liz Truss swipes at ‘unelected’ officials

• UK politics – latest updates

Penny Mordaunt, a potential Conservative leadership challenger to Rishi Sunak, is among the cabinet ministers wavering over whether to support the prime minster’s generational smoking ban.

Mordaunt, the leader of the House of Commons, is known to have reservations about the prime minister’s tobacco and vapes bill and the precedent it would set for banning other unhealthy things.

Research reveals ‘long-lasting effects’ caused by pressure from parents, families, bullies and the media

Parents who tease their children about their weight are putting them at greater risk of feeling bad about their bodies decades later, regardless of whether they grow up to have obesity or not, a groundbreaking study has found.

Thirteen-year-olds who felt pressure from family members to shed pounds and endured weight-based teasing showed higher levels of internalised weight stigma when they turned 31, according to research by the University of Bristol published on Tuesday in the Lancet Regional Health Europe journal.

The devastating report questions the ethics of those who put young people on life-altering pathways based on little but professional hunches

‘First, do no harm” is the sacrosanct principle that is supposed to underpin modern medicine. But history is littered with examples of medics breaching this doctrine. Last week, the publication of Hilary Cass’s final report on healthcare for gender-questioning children laid bare the devastating scale of NHS failures of a vulnerable group of children and young people, buoyed by adult activists bullying anyone who dared question a treatment model so clearly based on ideology rather than evidence.

Cass is a renowned paediatrician and her painstakingly thorough review was four years in the making. She sets out how the now-closed NHS specialist gender clinic for children abandoned evidence-based medicine for a wing and a prayer. Significant numbers of gender-questioning children – it’s impossible to know exactly how many because the clinic did not keep records, itself a scandal – were put on an unevidenced medical pathway of puberty-blocking drugs and/or cross-sex hormones, despite risks of harm in relation to brain development, fertility, bone density, mental health and adult sexual functioning.

Clinicians and managers must be held to account for the travesty in which adult beliefs were allowed to drive healthcare for children

‘They deserve very much better,” the distinguished paediatrician Hilary Cass concludes in the final report of her independent review of NHS gender identity services for children and young people. The report details how a vulnerable group has been “exceptionalised” by the NHS and denied the evidence-based healthcare all patients have the right to expect.

Just how badly wrong things went at the gender identity development service (Gids) is evidenced in the fact that Cass felt she had to explicitly state that, while some people argue that clinical care for children should be based on a “social justice” model, “the NHS works in an evidence-based way”. That should never have been up for debate: as the British Medical Journal argued in its editorial on the Cass review last week, it is deeply unethical to provide untested medical interventions for children that lack evidence of benefit, yet are life-altering and come with potentially very significant harms.

The rise in mental health problems in young people should force politicians to act

Across the rich world, a problem emerges. Children are spending more time hunched over iPhones working on their personal brands and less time building mud huts in the woods with their friends. Social stakes have got higher: the right post, message, or photo can give you a huge blast of approval; one mis-step could make you an outcast.

Playful and elastic real-life interactions have been replaced by unforgiving virtual hierarchies, in which your position is precisely quantified, recorded and made to matter more.