The UK’s Eugenics Mindset: Engineering Bodies and Minds
Justine Brooks / Jan 21 / Ethics of Governance
Photo: Hannah McKay Reuters
The story of eugenics did not end with Nazi extermination camps: it is entwined into current UK politics. Despite their harrowing history and continuous scientific negation, eugenic ideologies concerning human desirability continue to be welcomed into the country’s political inner circle.
By promoting prejudice as scientific, this eugenic mindset is dangerous in its ability to naturalise inequality and validate racist, ableist and classist commentary.
Introducing eugenics
Eugenics is any belief or practice which proclaims genetics and breeding to be the source of a great, high functioning society. It maintains that key physical and behavioural traits are determined and irreversible.
‘Eugenics’ literally means ‘good genes’, but what makes genes ‘good’ is highly subjective. Eugenics can therefore be linked to problematic ideas of desirability.
For over a century, vulnerable groups have been subjected to sterilisation, forced contraception and genocide in the name of eugenics. In the UK, the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913 proposed the mass segregation of those deemed ‘mentally deficient’. In the U.S., eugenic philosophy was used to sterilise thousands of BAME women until the 1970s. Today, China is known to be limiting Muslim Uyghur births with sterilisation and the forced fitting of IUDs.
Despite considerable variations across time and geography, eugenics’ ideological culture is bound by common values. In the UK, this culture continues to have influence and has found its way into the highest office. Within Boris Johnson’s inner circle (and beyond) exists an ideological culture sympathetic to pro-eugenic principles.
The UK’s modern eugenic commentary
Eugenic ideology has historically referred to IQ scores in attempting to prove the differences between races. When Boris Johnson was the editor of The Spectator, he oversaw the publishing of an article, by Greek journalist Taki, which claimed that “Orientals … have larger brains and higher IQ scores. Blacks are at the other pole.” Not only has this ‘race science’ been continually debunked, but IQ testing is known to have a bias adhering to Western ideas of intelligence. IQ testing has a history of marginalising poor and BAME communities, sometimes leading to the sterilisation of women of these communities. The hereditarian position, which promotes a relationship between race and intelligence, has been criticised as “unsupported by current evidence” within biological journals. Aside from including misinformation, Taki’s article was aggressively divisive. Yet, it was deemed information worth circulating by our current Prime Minister.
Andrew Sabisky, Johnson’s ex-adviser, has been completely transparent in his support for eugenics. In a 2016 interview, Sabisky stated that “eugenics are about selecting ‘for’ good things. Intelligence is largely inherited and it correlates with better outcomes: physical health, income, lower mental illness.” Sabisky even proposed legally enforced contraception taken on the onset of puberty to prevent the creation of a “permanent underclass”. No. 10 refused to comment on any of this. Sabisky also advised that the government pays attention to “the very real racial differences in intelligence”, which are “genetic in origin”, in consideration of immigration control. Considering that 49% of the UK’s fastest-growing start-ups have at least one foreign-born co-founder, Sabisky’s advice is completely untenable.
Johnson’s history of hiring pro-eugenicists includes Dominic Cummings. In 2020, while acting as Chief Adviser to the Prime Minister, Cummings went on to voice his support for a future holding “designer babies”. In the future, he claimed, all people should be able to select embryos with “the highest prediction for IQ”. In 2013, Cummings contended that “a child’s performance has more to do with genetic makeup than the standard of his or her education”. Here, he confuses privilege for inherent greatness. His outlook willingly neglects factors including socioeconomic background, nutrition or adequate learning resources. This viewpoint, that children are largely born into static roles, is particularly alarming considering his previous role as Special Adviser to the Secretary of State for Education.
Conservative British social commentator Toby Young has also been openly pro-eugenics. His history includes employment onto government projects and support from Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Theresa May. In 2015, he wrote that genetically engineered intelligence should be offered “free of charge to parents on low incomes with below-average IQs”. This perspective is accompanied by a number of ablest views that shape his approach to human ‘betterment’. In 2012, he was critical of wheelchair ramps and the notion of inclusivity, which apparently caters to “a functionally illiterate troglodyte with a mental age of six”.
Young, like Cummings, has contended that teaching is outweighed by genetic makeup. Young was appointed to head of the government-funded charity New Schools Network and became the CEO of the West London Free School Trust. For thousands of children, his eugenic-inspired ethos had become a daily reality. Young was attempting to run schools by the philosophy that teaching is ineffective and many students, due to ‘faulty’ genetics, were beyond hope. He commented, “it is naïve to think schools can do much to ameliorate the effects of inequality. I don’t just mean socio-economic inequality; I also mean differences in intelligence.” With this stark educational philosophy in mind, free schools began to target applications from “social mobility cold spots”, i.e. socioeconomically disadvantaged areas. Someone who believed that schools could not alleviate the effects of inequality became increasingly responsible for the education and support of children who felt the impact of inequality the most.
Then-Shadow Education Secretary Angela Rayner called free schools an “ideological obsession” that fails to address “the real problems facing education in our country”. The ‘innovative’ nature of teaching in free schools has been debunked. Free schools were an expensive government failure, in which £186 million had been spent on failed free schools alone. Young confessed the inadequacies of these schools and resigned. He admitted to regretting criticising teachers and state schools. In action, his genetic-driven, ‘innovative’ ideology failed to deliver.
In 2017, Young attended an invite-only pro-eugenics conference hosted by the London Conference on Intelligence (LCI) at UCL. The Conference enacts “extreme measures of secrecy” and primarily discusses race, intelligence and eugenics. Its history includes hosting speakers who are white supremacists and one researcher who has advocated for child rape. Andrew Sabisky was a speaker at their 2015 conference. Following the public exposure of his attendance at the LCI meeting, Young was forced to resign as director of New Schools Network.
These eugenics-inspired ideologies enact a choice to ignore inconvenient truths. Amounting low income or poor mental health to faulty genetics opportunely ignores factors such as insufficient welfare systems, institutional racism and economic systems that rely on a wealth gap. Holding children’s genetics responsible for academic downfall diverts the eye from real issues within the education system.
Matthew Aron Ginther’s paper, The Cult of Quality, explores a similar dynamic: after the collapse of slavery in the U.S., there was a rise in Black crime. Through a eugenic narrative, the American elite claimed that this revealed a “growing mental degeneration” and “feeblemindedness” amongst Black people. This explanation replaced facing the clear damage that slavery had inflicted on society and the lasting trauma Black individuals experienced.
Both then and now, eugenics can be used as a device to validate inequalities as the natural order. It attempts to place discrimination within the realm of objective, scientific fact.
Eugenics: a pseudoscience?
Specific kinds of eugenics have scientific merit because genetics play a role in our makeup. For instance, it has been found that gene editing is a hopeful prospect in curing Huntington’s disease.
The issue is that a certain kind of eugenics, with little-to-no scientific backing, has been instrumentalised to reinforce socio-political commentary. Human eugenics to reproduce ‘desirable’ traits such as intelligence has been widely critiqued within the scientific community. Science journalist Gaia explains that this form of eugenics is not possible because “we are not set in stone by a few genes but made in a cultural developing bath.”
Geneticist Adam Rutherford also directly criticised Sabisky and Cummings’ comments on eugenics. He maintains that their words resembled “the marshalling of misunderstood or specious science into a political ideology.”
Socially focused and generalised eugenics has no place in science, let alone politics.
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Eugenic sciences are not inherently evil. It is how eugenics is used which defines its ethical nature. When overly politicised, eugenics is more of a dangerous pseudoscience than an insight into a scientifically sound future.
These statements from Cummings, Sabisky and Young were said publicly; contemplating what could be said beyond the public eye, and what philosophies may influence governmental decision making, is unnerving.
This eugenic-inspired mindset aids in justifying inequality and burying key issues. There should not be a place for such outdated and divisive ideologies amongst our governing elite. In principle it is immoral; in practice, as seen with Young’s involvement in free schools, it is useless to society’s progression.
This controversial science is far from a lost artefact from dark histories. It continues to provide a means to degrade the humanity of race, class and ability – and hold influence amongst the UK’s current policymaking elite.