Health Secretary Wes Streeting says the meningitis outbreak in Kent is being managed on a national level as cases rose to 20 yesterday, up from 15. A targeted vaccine programme is being set up at the University of Kent, and cases are now being treated in hospitals in London and France. MSPs have rejected a bill to legalise assisted dying in Scotland. The proposal, which was tabled by Liberal Democrat Liam McArthur and would have allowed terminally ill, mentally competent patients to end their lives, was defeated by 69 votes to 57 following an emotionally charged final debate yesterday. Think twice before purging your wardrobe, because your clothes will be back in fashion by 2046. A new study drawing on one of the biggest databases of women’s fashion – including tens of thousands of garments, sewing patterns and archive images from 1869 to today – found that trends, in particular the rise and fall of hemlines, move in a predictable two-decade cycle.

The Bank of England’s decision to swap the historical figures on our banknotes for British wildlife after a public vote has been met with “scoffs and cries of wokery”, says Emily Watkins in The i Paper. But I think it’s a “stroke of genius”. The current line-up – Jane Austen, Winston Churchill, JMW Turner, Alan Turing – are all white and “varying degrees of posh”, so if we want the currency to reflect the country, we’ve “failed at the first hurdle”. But of course, as a nation, we are too various to be represented by any handful of dead people – “and that’s something to be celebrated rather than bemoaned”. Plus, if what’s printed on the money is what we “hold in reverence”, we could do a lot worse than putting the natural world on that pedestal. “I’ll take a badger over Winston Churchill any day.”

If you’re looking for a metaphor for the decline of Western civilisation, says Gerard Baker in The Wall Street Journal, look no further. Like the diversity-vigilant types who run most British public institutions, the bureaucrats at the BoE were presumably terrified they’d be shouted at by “cultural vigilantes” if they suggested a new crop of dead white folk, but “couldn’t come up with a sufficiently recognisable black or brown-skinned lesbian or Muslim”. No matter that Jane Austen is one of the world’s greatest novelists or that Alan Turing – one of the only gay men to have been honoured on national currency – paved the way for modern computing. Better the “inclusive safety” of tawny owls and voles than a defence of British titans. Evidently the elites that still have the country in their grip remain committed to the “slow eradication of the nation’s traditional values”.