This is a piece I found on YouTube by the disabled vlogger, Tony Linford, commenting on Toby Young’s attendance at a eugenics conference at University College London. The video was posted on the 11th January 2018, so it’s somewhat old news now. But I wanted to put it up, as it gives the perspective of a disabled person on Young and his grotty views.
Linford makes the point that the Nazis considered the congenitally disabled ‘lebensunwertigen’ – ‘unworthy of life’, and that they were murdered by the SS as part of the Nazis’ eugenics programme. He goes on to stoutly defend the right of all disabled people to life, and movingly talks about his experience meeting one severely disabled youngster being cared. The lad was in a wheelchair, and was mentally challenged, in the polite way of talking about it. Nevertheless, the lad was full of life and energy, and bubbling with ideas. Linford states that he learned a lot from him. He sadly reflects that the lad’s probably dead by now, but as disabled as he was, he was certainly not ‘lebensunwertigen’.
And discussing Young and his vile opinions on selective breeding, he also wonders how many others in the Tory party also hold the same disgusting views.
My guess is that there’s quite a few, but they keep very, very quiet about it because their leaders know full well the storm of outrage they’ll cause if they ever make their beliefs public. Maggie’s mentor, Keith Joseph, provoked such indignation with his comment in the 1970s that unmarried mothers were ‘a threat to our stock’. Young clearly thought he could get away with such views. Looking at some of the videos on YouTube, it appears that the Spectator had published a piece ‘The Return of Eugenics’, which was plastered all over its front cover. It looks like that after this piece was published, and didn’t seem to have people rioting in the streets, Young thought he would be safe. I am glad that he was profoundly mistaken.
Young and the other Tory eugenics snobs, Ben Bradley, who wanted the unemployed sterilised and the police to play ‘splat the chav’ with watercannon during the London riots six years ago, and his defender James Cleverly, hold thoroughly disgusting views. It’s the same attitude Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics, had, who was terrified that the biologically unfit poor would outbreed respectable, biologically superior middle and upper class people. It’s the views of privileged public schoolboys, who see themselves as innately biologically superior to everyone else, and have nothing but contempt for their social inferiors.
Cleverly tried defending Bradley’s comments about sterilising the unemployed by bleating something about it being at heart, a ‘reasonable’ statement about personal responsibility. Er, no. If the argument was about personal responsibility, then it would have been about encouraging those, who can’t afford children to use contraception. That would be about personal responsibility, as the choice would still be that of the unemployed whether or not they wanted to bring another life into the world.
Bradley’s comment was about denying the unemployed any personal responsibility, by taking away their personal freedom and forcibly sterilising them. It was a moralistic, punitive attitude by someone, who clearly has nothing but a Daily Mail-type rage against the poorest members of society.
And it isn’t just proles and the lumpenproletariat, who become unemployed. It also strikes respectable middle class people. I can remember hearing Tim Waterstone, the founder of the chain of booksellers that bears his name, speaking on the radio one day about how he spent a period unemployed. He described his feelings of absolute humiliation at the experience. Waterstone was lucky, in that I think he went on from this to start up his chain of stores. But others aren’t. They are laid off, or their businesses fail. And the lifestyle they found easy to support on their previously high salaries suddenly become a heavy burden. What happens to these people, if they have large families that they may find difficulty providing for if and when they are made unemployed? In Ben Bradley’s ideal eugenics Britain, would they be sterilised? Or do they get a pass, because they’re nice and middle class? Given the way the Tory party does everything it can to give extra money to the rich, while denying the poor the financial and medical support they need, my guess is that if this happened to a large number of middle class people, Bradley would be loudly screaming about how disgraceful it all was and demanding government support for them. His attitudes show the class snobbery that runs through Tory politics, and particularly through May’s government of privileged toffs.
The Nazis used eugenics not just to murder the disabled, but as part of their attempted extermination of the Jews during the Holocaust. The German historian Martin Broszat, in his The Hitler State, points out that the Nazi murder of the disabled served as a trial run for the mass slaughter of the Jews, including the use of poison gas. And there were Nazis and Nazi-sympathisers over here, who shared the same horrendous views.
One of these was Lord Lymington, an aristocrat, who wished to recreate the rural, agrarian and feudal society he idealised over modern capitalist, industrial society. Lymington was also a fan of eugenics, and in his 1943 book, Alternative to Death: The Relationship between Soil, Family and Community, discussed ‘the dangers of losing our own character from alien influence and blood’ in which he ranted about the threat to British racial purity from ‘the marketer, the unscrupulous trader, the slick haggler, the seditious natural underdog’, who was a type of immigrant ‘too often conditioned to the mental slum and the bazaar’. (See Richard Griffiths, What Did You Do During the War? The Last Throes of the British Pro-Nazi Right (Routledge, 2017) 240-1.) All of which is coded way of playing on anti-Semitic prejudice, without actually spelling it out in so many words. The quote graphically demonstrates why so many people found Young and his belief in eugenics so repulsive, that he ended up resigning from his position on the universities’ regulatory board. And why so many people this week have been extremely unimpressed with Bradley and Cleverly, and their stupid, bigoted, dangerous and contemptible comments.
Tags: 'The Hitler State', 'What Did You Do During the War?', anti-semitism, Aristocracy, Ben Bradley, Charles Darwin, Conservatives, Daily Mail, Eugenics, Francis Galton, Holocaust, James Cleverly, Jews, Keith Joseph, Lord Lymington, Margaret Thatcher, Martin Broszat, Middle Class, Poison Gas, Police, Public Schools, Richard Griffiths, SS, Sterilisation, the Disabled, the Poor, the Rich, Theresa May, Tim Waterstone, Toby Young, Tony Linford, University College London, Unmarried Mothers, Upper Class, Water Cannon, Waterstone's, Youtube
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January 25, 2018 at 11:22 pm |
Reblogged this on sdbast.
January 26, 2018 at 2:17 pm |
I often pop by Linford’s blog, as he gives himself the time and space to explain some of the issues many are so busy trying to fit into the “twitter” 128 character soundbite. These are complex issues, with long and deliberately forgotten episodes in our own history. Even members of the Labour Party, the Fabians being some of the recognizable names now, who were also eugenicists. After WWII it became unacceptable, but it became unspoken rather than really damned. The current attack on the disabled and sick, now reaching into abuse of the elderly poor, is a classic re-run of the fascist process. The suggestion of forced sterilisation is repugnant, but then as we recoil then the insidious “lesser” options start appearing. Like the Workhouses separated families to dehumanise, would that be on the agenda, as removing the right to be able to take part in society is already a reality for many disabled and sick now? It may seem outlandish, but as the disabled communities can tell anyone, this is what the denial of human rights looks like.
I have long held the view that eugenics (like sociopathy) is indeed a cultural attribute of certain classes in the UK, those who like to think of themselves as the “upper” class, the aristocracy etc., but couched in terms of Social Darwinism now. Marie Stopes did not pioneer contraception for the masses because she wanted women to have safer lives, but because she too believed the poor should be stopped from breeding. It is the entire basis for the establishment to have separate schools, selective universities using “feeder schools” like Eton, and for the total dominance of professions like the law, politics, some parts of commerce (but not industry). Those I know who broke through the invisible boundary into that clique have either been willing to ape the entire culture (“go native”) and / or of foreign origin so that one’s class is not immediately obvious when speaking.
There is a huge amount to be said on this subject! But at it’s heart is the establishment gearing up to assault our human rights, to family life, to food and shelter, and to life itself ultimately. Early (and harrowing) death as an outcome of disability is now proven to be “acceptable”, as the knowledge of many tens of thousands of dead under this government pass without any sense of shame or even remark by the government and the establishment.