The Conservative Party's Eugenics Problem

To find one leading Conservative mouthing off about eugenics is unfortunate, the incidence of others indicates something else. We know about Toby Young, the self-styled "Toadmeister" and his hanging around with Nazis and paedophile apologists at a eugenics conference. He was joined this week by Ben Bradley, the Tories' new youth supremo for ill-advised blog posts advocating vasectomies for the unemployed. Speaking of the young, the semi-official Tory youth movement got it in the neck during the summer for private chats that featured "gassing chavs" among the banter, and during his mayoralty Boris Johnson (who else?) got himself in hot water by pinning inequality on IQ levels. There's more. Newly-minted minister Suella Fernandez and fellow MP John Penrose are opposed to the EU Charter of Rights because, among other things, it disallows eugenics.

If that hasn't sated your appetite, there is this:

A high and rising proportion of children are being born to mothers least fitted to bring children into the world.... Some are of low intelligence, most of low educational attainment. They are unlikely to be able to give children the stable emotional background, the consistent combination of love and firmness…. They are producing problem children…. The balance of our human stock, is threatened ...

This was from Keith Joseph's infamous 'Our human stock is threatened' speech, the very same Keith Joseph who was a key influence on and confidant of one Margaret Thatcher - you might have heard of her. Whether there is a relationship between this and the social Darwinist policies the Tories unleashed in the 1980s (a decade in which Joseph continued to lobby for his views, albeit more discreetly) I'll leave others to ponder on. But the point remains, go back through the history of the Tory party and you will find a current, albeit one that becomes more submerged with time, of advocacy of and sympathy with eugenics. Why?

Let us be clear. There are eugenics and there are eugenics. In his reviled but revealing musings on the subject, Tony Young makes the case for "progressive eugenics", a number of biomedical technologies that should be made available to poor would-be parents to engineer their children, in utero, with intellectual and physiological advantages to compensate them for a disadvantaged start in life. It's nonsensical, but Young fits in a long-standing and deeply embedded tradition of eugenics that works to facilitate the reproduction of fit human beings. Naturally, and for good reason, in as far as the term has a popular understanding it is associated with the policies of Nazi Germany, the death camps, and its crank but murderous preoccupation with racial hygiene. But the Nazis were far from the only enthusiastic advocates for the prevention of the spread (and elimination) of the "unfit"; it was a policy followed up in several Western countries after the war with forced sterilisation of the mentally ill, and people with complex and special needs.

Neither of these are acceptable, but eugenics has deep cultural roots and, I'd argue, inseparable from how states govern. The cultivation of the body, the exercise of its physical and intellectual capacities and elevating this as a standard to aspire to goes back to Rome and ancient Greece. The rediscovery of these as virtues dates from the Renaissance to the early modern period. As absolutist and modern states emerged from the wreckage of feudalism, as workers were forced off the land and into waged labour authorities were faced with two problems. There was the question of how to manage populations and maintain public order in large urban concentrations, and how to ensure they were fit enough to supply Europe's endless wars the requisite cannon fodder and provide able-bodied labour power to work the land and then the factories. It's around this time classifications were made and gained force as the centuries wore on: the dividing up of populations into hierarchies by ethnicities and races, the divisions between the deserving and the feckless, of the normal and the mad, and the moral from the immoral. Apparatuses were in motion classifying and labelling populations, while the authorities were able to make use of them as means of managing them, and dividing them according to this problematic.

After two world wars, the problem of management remained the same. As Clare Hanson in her 2013 book, Eugenics, Literature, and Culture in Post-war Britain makes plain, eugenics found a quiet second wind as the new welfarist order was built. Social security as shaped by bourgeois experts and implemented by a Labour Party scarred by the collective memory of the Depression and war was an opportunity to put eugenicist policies into practice. The tripartite education system, for example, was explicitly designed to select for nascent bourgeois qualities among working class kids and socially separate them out during their secondary schooling. The big shift in the alliance between eugenics and the welfare state for Hanson came with the election of Thatcher and the subsequent imposition of market fundamentalism. Here eugenics didn't disappear, but were effectively de-collectivised and privatised. The state was, at least officially, not overtly concerned with population management - this responsibility was devolved to a proliferation of governances of the self. Yet, of course, the state was very interested in the collective fate of the nation as it aided and abetted new divisions between the deserving and undeserving poor, promulgated Victorian values, made hay with the AIDS epidemic, demonised immigrants, and so on. There was a fit population of upright citizens, and there was another Britain of the undesirables and the underclass.

Interestingly, after Thatcher had gone and her legacy limped on in John Major's enfeebled government, the baton was picked up by New Labour. While pursuing economic policies that remained within the Thatcherite mold, Blairism did rebuild the public realm and make significant inroads into child and pensioner poverty, as well as tackle the Tory left overs of crumbling hospitals and schools (though in such a way that Blairism wrecked the party), but the eugenics streak came to the surface. Sure Start, for example, has made a real difference to millions of parents. However its design was about inculcating parental virtues as well as offering child care facilities. They were (and are) instruments for the moral improvement of the working class, defined and devised entirely from above. Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime saw a ramping up of authoritarian discipline in schools, and a web of measures linking children's behaviour to an array of sanctions that could be enforced against their parents. Social security deepened Thatcherite logics with the introduction of welfare-to-work schemes that, again, didn't lead to real jobs but "morally improved" the feckless workless according to norms that once ruled the workhouse. The nearest New Labour came to openly touting eugenics was the proposal to fight "social exclusion" by identifying "at risk" babies before they were born. The fag end of Blair's time was about "troubled families" and broken relationships, completely divorced from his government's social policy that, unconsciously, was corrosive of social solidarities.

This brings us up to date. The Tories' embrace of austerity has meant defunding New Labour's hands-on approach, and has abandoned their liberal eugenics for something more sinister: eugenics by indifference. The cuts to adult social care, the underfunding of the NHS, the bedroom tax, cuts to council tax benefit, the explosion of JSA sanctions, the stubborn insistence on the work capability assessment has, as we know, led to at least 120,000 excess deaths during their period of office. These are the most vulnerable, the most infirm, the most precarious people. In other words, this is eugenics as social murder, a dying off of what Ebenezer Scrooge called the "surplus population": people who cannot work and/or live lifestyles that attract moralistic sneers from the very class that oversees this system. The horror is only acknowledged by the Tories in one way, as the (justified) consequence of failures of individual responsibility. They made the wrong choices and they have to take responsibility for them. The victims and survivors of Tory austerity are unpeople who deserve no sympathy, no recognition of their humanity and if they are to be noted at all, it's as butts of eugenics fantasies spoken aloud.

Eugenics then as a self-styled science of human improvement is inseparable from management, from governance and from government. It is a body of knowledge that ranges across human knowledge that informs policy, popular culture, and research trajectories in the biological sciences. But it is not and has never been separate from power, of the management of populations by governments and state institutions. Eugenics, whether "positive" or negative, is an outlook, a distorted view of the way of the social world as it appears from above, from the summit of governing elites and ruling classes. Eugenics so informs the Tories not because they are empty of other ideas, which they are, but because it's a fundamental part of their make up. As the preferred party of government, as the defender of privilege, as the champion of minority interests against those of the overwhelming majority, eugenics as a tool of control and a technology of discipline is organic to their political project. The likes of Toby Young, Boris Johnson and Ben Bradley are not aberrations. They are spokespeople of an attitude, an idea, a sensibility that is inseparable from Toryism.