While holed up in the Travelodge, Euston last night (oh, the glamour) I caught the end of a discussion on Radio 4 with Jonathon Freedland, who, writing as Sam Bourne, has a new thriller out. It’s called Pantheon, and it’s about wartime Oxford, with its checkpoints, spies and blacked-out windows. The protagonist delves into a murky world in the UK and USA, which leads him to the science of eugenics. Freedland will be discussing his book with James Purnell as part of the Jewish Book Week on 26 February, if you’re interested.

What struck me is the backdrop: the world of eugenics. It’s a dark subject, with the taint of the gas chambers hanging over it. The idea, based on Darwin’s Origin of the Species, is that like animals, humans can be bred to ensure healthy ‘superior’ genes prosper, while inferior genes are driven from the gene pool. Through selective breeding, humans can develop into healthier, longer-living creatures, free from genetic afflictions. Eugenics, backed up by leading scientists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, was remarkably popular with the political elite. Winston Churchill, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, George Bernard Shaw, William Beveridge, HG Wells and John Maynard Keynes were all card-carrying eugenicists. Some might like to try to blame it all on the Fabian Society, but eugenicists belonged to all parties and none. It was strong among the scientific elite as well as the political one.

For the socialists, the argument ran that just all the resources of the earth should be held in common, and directed by the state, so the development of the human race should be planned and directed. George Bernard Shaw wrote that ‘The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man’ and William Beveridge, whose report has its seventieth anniversary this year, wrote that ‘those men who through general defects are unable to fill such a whole place in industry are to be recognised as unemployable. They must become the acknowledged dependents of the state … but with complete and permanent loss of all citizen rights – including not only the franchise but civil freedom and fatherhood.’ It’s that last word that should make your blood chill.

In an article in the New Statesman (which also supported the eugenics movement) in December 2009, Victoria Brignell linked eugenics with calls in the 20th century for forced sterilisation of people with disabilities. She pointed to parliamentary demands for hit squads touring the slums to weed out ‘defectives’, to be sent to colonies. On the night MPs debated the Beveridge Report, its author was addressing a meeting of eugenicists at the Mansion House.

It is not hard to see the link between this kind of thinking, and the racial theories and murderous practices of the Nazis. After the war, the popularity of eugenics waned. The British Eugenics Society became the Galton Institute in 1989 (it’s still going strong, although no longer holds the views that it once did.) In many countries around the world, the influence of eugenics remained strong. In the USA, states organised sterilisation programmes well after the end of the second world war.

The main defect of eugenics is not the science. For example, it is laudable that scientific advance can eradicate harmful genetic diseases and conditions. Compulsory blood tests on Cyprus, for example, have helped to drive down the numbers of babies with Thalasaemia Major, which occurs when two people with Thalasaemia Minor procreate. This is a blood trait which I happen to carry.

The problem comes when cultural and social attitudes are applied to the science. In the 20th century, the liberal elite’s loathing of the poor played into their desire for selective breeding. Later, horrible attitudes towards disabled people were masked with faux-concern and pseudo-science.

What if a ‘cure’ for hereditary deafness could be developed? There are millions of sign language-using profoundly deaf people who consider themselves a cultural minority, not disabled. They consider cochlear implants to be cultural oppression. They would think of a ‘cure’ for deafness to be nothing short of genocide.

These debates matter as the prospects of ‘designer babies’ get closer. The eugenicists, ranging from the eccentrics to the racists, could never have imagined the human genome project or modern gene theory. In the coming years, the idea of what attributes are desirable in humans will be debated once again. The job of progressives is to argue that all of humanity, whatever its genetic make-up, has equal worth. The Euston Travelodge doesn’t have much of a library, but I think I’m right to say it was Emmanuel Kant who said ‘out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.’

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Paul Richards writes a weekly column for Progress, Paul’s week in politics

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Photo: SNappa2006