The Supreme Court has done us a massive favour.  

And I'm not referring to the American court, who have unquestionably made the right call over migration.  

But I refer to our Supreme Court who brought to an end, thank the good Lord, this incessant debate over fluoride.  

To my mind, it was never really a case. To claim its mass medication is farcical and was never going to stand up.  

Not in a lower court, not in our top court.  

But the advantage of their ruling, and the fact they are our top court, at least brings this to a close.  

Hold any view you want on fluoride, the fact remains and does not and cannot now change.  

Fluoride in law is not mass medication, and as such councils can get on and make their own decisions around it.  

The downside of this case has been two-fold.  

One, it took six years, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt, justice moves too slowly.  

And two the quality of the debate had become toxic.  

On the first point, the slowness causes a number of issues not least of which is financial.

Time costs money, not just in lawyers but in delayed decision making.

Just for argument's sake, say we all agreed fluoride is good for teeth, and therefore if a council had fluoridated their water six years back, how many kids would be better off because of it?

Anything that takes six years in terms of a decision is about five and a half years too long.  

As regards the second bit, the toxicity, I welcome the opportunity to never talk about this again.  

Unlike most debates it lost its civility, the anti-fluoride brigade aren't normal.  

They became obsessed and obsessive, they lost the plot.  

A good debate is an agree to disagree debate.  

Every time you used the word fluoride the floodgates would open. I'd receive e-mails with 200-page attachments full of, scientific findings, journals and papers.

But they all peddle the same argument, the same case, the same papers and the same research.  

It was a smallish clique of obsessives, who had clearly bandied together and passed all their best material around to launch a sort of on-going bombardment.

What they forgot is when you see a bit of this in this game, you can very quickly spot the repetition, the tell-tale signs of organised PR.

My advice is don’t do it, it's a massive turn off.  

It's like the drunk guy at the party who tells you he once heard your show and just has a couple of quick points he'd like to make so you can improve it, and then doesn’t let you out of his sight for the rest of the night.

You are a single issue bore. And that doesn't make for good debate.  

So, we are done. Fluoridate away, and I hope councils do. This decision should, by the way, be a government decision not localised.

But that’s for another day, for now, the debate is, thank god, over.