The response to Toby Young's appointment to the new Office for Students has covered the whole range from "He's not the best person for the job" to "He's the worst person for the job". Some of the reasons offered have to do with unsavoury comments about women; some have to do with his general lack of qualification. Writing in The Times, Janice Turner is - I think - balanced in her assessment of his qualities, but still finds him to be (to say the least) wanting. But the thing that's of interest to me here, on what is a bioethics-related blog, is one of the other sources of controversy: his public support for (a kind of) eugenics. The mere fact that he could be associated with eugenics has had some people in paroxysms. Taken more or less at random here's a tweet from Vince Cable:
Note that "backs eugenics" is offered as being a reason in itself to object to Young's appointment. Cable is not, by a long way, the only person to make this sort of comment.Theresa May stood by Toby Young when she should be firing him. This is a man who has a record of misogyny and backs eugenics. His appointment shows poor judgement and, as May admitted, a lack of due diligence. It seems all you need to survive is be a friend of Boris Johnson #Marr— Vince Cable (@vincecable) January 7, 2018
Is it justified, though? Well, the article that's generated the ire is this one, called "The Fall of the Meritocracy", published in 2015 in Quadrant. It's a long piece, and the eugenics bit only comes about 80% of the way through, and for that reason I'll only home in on a few details. But it is worth looking in a bit more depth at some of those details. I think that what he's arguing is, in many ways, fairly unremarkable. It's mistaken in important ways, too; I'll come to those in the next post. But whatever problems there are with the piece do not flow from the use of the "E-word". And so, to the greatest extent possible, I'll try to talk about it without mentioning eugenics.
