THE GUARDIAN

David Aaronovitch
Tuesday August 5, 2003
The Guardian

Words matter. One of my favourites is "freighted", suggesting that a phrase or a look is heavy with meaning, is carrying a cargo, some of which you can't see. So let's unpack the following sentence from the introduction to the new Conservative consultation document on public health, written by Tory spokesthing, Dr Liam Fox. "The Blair government," wrote Fox, "has stood silently on the politically correct sidelines while Britain has experienced a second Aids wave largely imported from Africa, an explosion of sexually transmitted diseases among our young people and a tidal wave of obesity that threatens to create a secondary diabetes epidemic that could swamp the NHS in future."

Let's leave Fox's image of a "tidal wave of obesity" to his analyst, and examine the phrase "the politically correct sidelines". "Politically correct" is, nowadays, usually a shorthand description for excessive over sensitivity to issues of race and gender. You can see what he's getting at with Aids, but how has such misplaced concern given rise in any way to sexually transmitted diseases among "our" young people, or to the adipose "tidal wave"?

It hasn't. Fox is telling us a simple political thing: "we" are being "swamped" by otherness. "Sick British people," he writes later, "are being deprived of the care they are entitled to by people who are abusing the system" (the extent to which they were deprived of such an entitlement seven years ago, this time by their own underspending government, is not mentioned).

Incidentally, the title of the document is Before It's Too Late: A New Agenda for Public Health. But before what is too late? The fat wave? The TB swamp? The penetration of Aids-carrying Africans? Or is it the race wave? "If issues," Fox told the Daily Telegraph, "such as the testing of those coming from overseas, are not addressed by the political mainstream... then we risk them being hijacked by political extremists with an entirely different and undesirable agenda."

Yup, if we don't pander to popular prejudice, then the far right will, and that would be much worse. So let's force anybody coming from abroad to live here to have tests to see (a) if they've got something nasty and communicable (question: if it's infectious, why not test all entrants?); (b) that they don't and won't need a lot of expensive health treatment (applicants with disabilities can sod right off); and (c) that they won't bring ancient bed-blocking relatives with them, but will leave such encumbrances back home in Dhaka or Brisbane to rot.

This may or may not be practicable. I'd guess not, given that nearly 110,000 work visas were issued in 2001, and 340,000 students were admitted. But where does the sudden urgency come from? A small part may be down to the melange of questionable statistics, assertions dressed as facts and straightforward scapegoating cranked out by Migration Watch UK and its main scribbler, Anthony Browne. You know the sort of thing. Housing shortages are caused by immigrants (and not by long-term changes in British family structures), Britain is twice as crowded as France, the British people don't like multi-culturalism, and - Browne's favourite - political correctness has allowed a health crisis into Britain.

And how dare people like me even suggest that some of this talk is occasioned by, or gives succour to racists? I'm trying to stifle debate.

Browne's big mate at Migration Watch is the Oxford demographer Professor David Coleman. I was told this week that this phlegmatic statistician is also a current member of the Galton Institute. This was, until the mid-80s, the Eugenics Society, but changed its name partly in honour of the founder of eugenics, Sir Francis Galton and partly because, after world war two, eugenics had become a dirty word.

In 1883 Galton himself defined eugenics as the "science of improving stock - not only by judicious mating, but whatever tends to give the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had". In his memoirs he wrote: "A democracy cannot endure unless it be composed of able citizens; therefore it must in self-defence withstand the free introduction of degenerate stock." Plenty of people did believe this stuff. Including the contraception pioneer, Marie Stopes.

Well, that was 1883. So what? In September 1999, Professor Glayde Whitney from Florida was invited to give a lecture - Man and Society in the New Millennium - to the Galton Institute. It's on the net, and you can read his attack on how marxism and political correctness have prevented a proper eugenics debate. You can also discover how Whitney had written a glowing preface to a recent American publication, praising it as "a painstakingly documented, academically excellent work of socio-biological-political history that has the potential to raise tremendous controversy and change the very course of history".

The book's publishers, however, claimed that the book, by former Ku Klux Klan leader, David Duke, "offers compelling evidence that belief in racial equality is the modern scientific equivalent of believing that the earth is flat", and that it explained "the Jewish role in leading the western world to the edge of a racial apocalypse".

The Galton Institute can disown Whitney, or Coleman can disown the institute, or Browne can disown Coleman (and I invite any of them to use this page to do it) and Fox can distance himself from Browne. But when you start talking about issues of health and race, such things are, shall we say, a little freighted.

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