Robin Monotti@robinmonotti
DEPOPULATION: THE FOUNDATIONAL DOCTRINE OF KEIR STARMER'S LABOUR PARTY:
'British socialism, reports Jonathan Freedland, had dreams almost as vile as those of the Nazis':
"The trouble began with Charles Darwin. His breakthrough work, The Origin of Species, did not restrict its impact to the academy and laboratories. Instead it transformed the very way mankind understood itself in the 19th century, its message fast spilling over into the realm of political ideas. Suddenly the religious notion that all life was equally sacred was under attack. Human beings were like any other species – some were more evolved than others. The human race could be divided into different categories and classes. Karl Marx acknowledged his debt – dedicating an early edition of Das Kapital to none other than Charles Darwin.
From the beginning, socialism regarded itself as the natural ally, even the political version, of science. Just as biologists sought to understand animals and plants, so scientific socialism would master people... Crucially, these early leftists regarded science as an utterly neutral tool; something could not be scientifically right and morally wrong. In this climate, says Wooldridge, “eugenics became the political correctness of its day”. If you were modern, you believed in it.
The result was a Darwinian commitment to improving the quality of the nation’s genetic stock. Many of the reforms admired by today’s leftists were not, in fact, borne of a benign desire to improve the lot of the poor, but rather to make Britons fitter – to guarantee their survival as one of the globe’s foremost races. Thus the Webbs pushed for free milk in schools not because their hearts bled for undernourished kids, but because they were alarmed by Britain’s performance in the Boer war, where troops had taken a good kicking at the hands of the black man: the Webbs believed a daily dose of calcium would improve the bones and teeth of the future working class.
The contemporary left has a similarly misguided and sentimental view of Marie Stopes’s campaign to bless the women of King’s Cross and the rest of working-class Britain with contraception. The unrosy reality is that Stopes, Mary Stocks and the like were not motivated by a kind of proto-feminism, but rather by the urge to reduce the numbers of the burgeoning lumpenproletariat. This rather awkward fact was exposed earlier this year with the release of a long-suppressed essay by the father of liberal economics, John Maynard Keynes. He endorsed legalised birth control because the working class was too “drunken and ignorant” to be trusted to keep its own numbers down: “To put difficulties in the way of the use of (contraception) checks increases the proportion of the population born from those who from drunkenness or ignorance or extreme lack of prudence are not only incapable of virtue but incapable also of that degree of prudence which is involved in the use of checks.”
Many on the left were members of the upper middle-class or lower aristocracy, convinced their higher intellectual capacities had to be preserved from proletarian infection. One popular idea of the time was to encourage artificial insemination – not to help the infertile, but to impregnate working-class women with the sperm of men with high IQs. Beatrice Webb was sure her genetic material was worth preserving, describing herself as “the cleverest member of one of the cleverest families in the cleverest class of the cleverest nation of the world”. She and her fellow travellers envisaged a world run by an elite made up of people like her, able to determine who could reproduce and who could not. Always fond of gazing into the future, HG Wells pictured a caste of all-powerful super-talented Ubermenschen, who would wear Samurai-style dress, and order the affairs of the planet.
In this context, there was only contempt for ordinary people, who were regarded as “sub-men” to be tended and looked after – via the welfare state – like a bovine herd."
