Robin Monotti

"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 progressives were drawn to the hope that science could build up the strong parts of the nation, and slowly eliminate the weak. Dozens of them signed up for the Eugenics Society, which in the 1930s rivalled the Fabians as the fashionable salon of London socialism. Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson even wanted the society to form its own committee of Labour sympathisers. HG Wells could not contain his enthusiasm, hailing eugenics as the first step toward the removal “of detrimental types and characteristics” and the “fostering of desirable types” in their place.

For these early thinkers, eugenic socialism posed no contradiction: indeed, it made perfect sense. As Wooldridge points out, “the Webbs supported eugenic planning just as fervently as town planning”. If socialism was about organising and ordering society from the centre, then its most extreme advocates believed in extending that control – all the way into the wombs and testes of society’s weakest members. What they wanted was a neat, clean, planned Utopia: eugenics was just one part of that dream.

One other doctrine was crucial – profound elitism. It strikes the 1990s ear oddly, but these leading lights of British socialism had no patience for equality. The communist and one-time editor of the Daily Worker, JBS Haldane, considered equality a “curious dogma … we are not born equal, far from it”. 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. The Labour cabinet minister Douglas Jay felt no embarrassment in putting the attitude on record in his pamphlet, The Socialist Cause. Famously and loftily he declared, “In the case of nutrition and health, just as in the case of education, the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves”.

"Non-Britons came even lower on the Darwinian pecking order. In those times it was the Jews who were regarded as posing the chief threat of alien dilution of English blood. Bernard Shaw described the Jews as “the real enemy, the invader from the East, the ruffian, the oriental parasite”.

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