Labour's love affair with Racial Hygiene

It was Major Archibald Church, Labour MP for Wandsworth, who as late as 1931 tried to get a compulsory sterilisation Bill through parliament, “in advance of public opinion”. Hansard reports his speech

Of course, it may be urged that mere sterilisation is not enough. It may be urged that that will not cure the problem of mental disease. We are not suggesting that it would, but we are suggesting that the knowledge which has been obtained and the statistics which have been compiled as to the ancestry of mental defectives in a number of different States and countries, show that anything from 45 to 80 per cent. of the mental defectives in those various States and countries are so because they have inherited defective germ plasm. We are suggesting that it would be advisable to take the risk and sterilise all the defectives in the hope that by a generation or so we shall reduce the mental defectives to measurable quantities.

Hyacinth Morgan, opposing the Bill, said

The House has heard a harrowing tale which is mostly moonshine. The Bill is said to be in advance of public opinion, but it is really in advance of common sense and ordinary sanity. With regard to mental defectives there is said to be an increase rising crescendo in geometrical progression to overwhelm the world in an avalanche of mental backwardness, and to lure the progressive world headlong into an abyss of degenerate civilisation.

Of course Wandsworth and the mention of ‘germ plasm’ link Labour’s Major Church with another dreadful old racist, the eugenicist Francis Galton, who inspired the founding of the Eugenics Society, which exists today (but perhaps not for much longer) as the Galton Institute, headquartered in Wandsworth.

Last week UCL announced that it was renaming a building named after Francis Galton because of his association with eugenics.  What other eponymous buildings, streets, structures, prizes and awards could be at risk?

Well, Labour and the Fabian Society were eugenics fascists in a big way. GB Shaw, of course, who wanted to use a ‘humane lethal gas’ in a sort of British Auschwitz as a final solution to mental defectives, Virginia Woolf who said of the mentally ill that “They should certainly all be killed”, Huxley, Aldous and Julian, the latter wanting a scheme to inseminate British housewives with the sperm of superior white oxbridge graduates to improve the race, Harold Laski, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Beveridge, who spoke at meetings of eugenicists, JBS Haldane, Keynes himself and local south-London Labour MP heroes such as Will Crooks, whose views did not quite chime with those we hold today about the disabled. Crooks described disabled people as “like human vermin” who “crawl about doing absolutely nothing, except polluting and corrupting everything they touch”.

Can we can now expect a bonfire of eponymous monuments and memorials to these sick puppies?

Of course, the nasty old slavery-funded Guardian also supported the eugenicists.

I’m afraid even the Manchester Guardian was not immune. When a parliamentary report in 1934 backed voluntary sterilisation of the unfit, a Guardian editorial offered warm support, endorsing the sterilisation campaign “the eugenists soundly urge”. If it’s any comfort, the New Statesman was in the same camp.

Writes Jonathan Freedland in a partially honest and open Guardian piece from 2012 – and indeed even the New Stasi has acknowledged some partial fault.

Be careful what you wish for, Comrades.