Excerpt from A Very Public Sociologist blogspot:
To find one leading Conservative mouthing off about eugenics is unfortunate, the incidence of others indicates something else. We know about Toby Young, the self-styled "Toadmeister" and his hanging around with Nazis and paedophile apologists at a eugenics conference. He was joined this week by Ben Bradley, the Tories' new youth supremo for ill-advised blog posts advocating vasectomies for the unemployed. Speaking of the young, the semi-official Tory youth movement got it in the neck during the summer for private chats that featured "gassing chavs" among the banter, and during his mayoralty Boris Johnson (who else?) got himself in hot water by pinning inequality on IQ levels. There's more. Newly-minted minister Suella Fernandez and fellow MP John Penrose are opposed to the EU Charter of Rights because, among other things, it disallows eugenics.
From Wikipedia:
In 2015, Young wrote an article for the Australian magazine Quadrant entitled "The fall of meritocracy". In it he advocated what he termed "progressive eugenics". Young proposed that when the technology for genetically engineered intelligence is practical it should be allowable for a decision to be made by poor parents with low IQs over which embryos should be allowed to develop using intelligence as a marker. "It could help to address the problem of flat-lining inter-generational social mobility", he wrote.[65][66]
In January 2018, Private Eye[67] and the London Student[68] revealed that Young attended the London Conference on Intelligence at University College London (UCL) in 2017, which was described by the media and a number of politicians as a "secret eugenics conference".[69] The conference was convened by Honorary UCL professor James Thompson, and included speakers such as Richard Lynn.[70]
Responding to these reports, Young wrote in The Spectator that he attended the conference as a journalist to report about it (which he later did) and that he "only [attended] for a few hours on a Saturday"[63] in preparation for the "super-respectable" International Society for Intelligence Research conference in Montreal in July 2017 at which he gave a speech, which was later published.[70][71][72] He also says that his resignation from the OfS and his presence at the conferences were unconnected.[72]
UCL launched an investigation into the London Conference on Intelligence, of which it had previously been unaware, for potentially breaking its room booking policy, after Young's presence at one of them had been revealed.[73][74] UCL has suspended any "further conferences of this nature".[75]
Young has been widely criticized for the scientific accuracy of statements he has made supporting eugenics.[76]
by Dr, Neal Curtis University of Auckland
Donald Trump and Boris Johnson's response to coronavirus has revealed some disturbing attitudes towards segments of the population
Boris Johnson is known as an enthusiastic social Darwinist who believes society should be organised to flush out the weak
Johnson is a vociferous advocate of philosophical aristocracy, by which I mean not simply a believer in necessary social hierarchy, but that those who are at the top are there because they are inherently, even genetically superior. He is also known as an enthusiastic social Darwinist who believes society should be organised to flush out the weak. The importance of competition in a capitalist system for him is precisely because only the fittest succeed.
In his 2013 Margaret Thatcher Memorial Lecture, he argued that the "violent economic centrifuge" or capitalism accentuates inequalities amongst people "who are already very far from equal in raw ability" before going on to propose that people are also inherently unequal in "spiritual worth". This aristocratic ethos also encourages an interest in eugenics, shared by a number of his advisers. From this perspective, the idea he should propose a cull as a means of disease prevention becomes rather chilling.
Over the course of the last five years, the rise of the alt-right—with whom Johnson has a connection via Steve Bannon—has been alarming. One of their aims has been to shift the ‘Overton Window’, or the frame of acceptable speech. In particular, they want eugenics put back on the agenda because it helps re-establish the pseudo race science they are so fond of. Hence, one other thing we should learn from this pandemic is just how effective this project has become.
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