Good Breeding

In 1904 a Royal Commission was established to look into The Care and Control of the Feebleminded. 'Feebleminded' was, then, a new addition to the psychiatric taxonomy of mental incapacity; the Idiots Act 1886 had put a distinction between 'idiocy' and 'imbecility' in law. Idiots were the least capable members of the society, under this definition, and the newer term 'feebleminded' was to refer to that group of people who could possibly work but needed help to overcome mental shortcomings that limited their independence. The Commission took a great deal of evidence from a range of experts and made its recommendations in a Report published in 1908 . These included placing the 'mentally defective' in 'colonies' where 'the inmates spent most of their time in workshops or working on the land [...] ' (p. 76). They considered whether it would be appropriate to restrict the ability of the mentally infirm to reproduce through either a programme of sterilisation or by preventing them from marrying, though they suggest that such a move would be contrary to 'the general feeling of the people' (p. 185), except in the most severe cases, where they recommend it.

Winston Churchill had no such reservations. By the time the report came out, he had been a cabinet minister for three years, with an even more longstanding concern for the impact of the 'feebleminded' on Britain, writing to his cousin Ivor Guest in 1899 'The improvement of the British breed is my aim in life'. He had followed with interest the introduction of a Eugenics Law in Indiana in 1907, which mandated the sterilisation of inmates deemed mentally unfit, and banned them from marrying. Despite the opposition of public, parliamentary and most scientific opinion to such measures, Churchill was convinced of their rightness: 'I am drawn to this subject in spite of many Parliamentary misgivings ... Of course it is bound to come some day'. He asked the Home Office to explore the possibility of introducing such a law and tried to explore what might be the most appropriate surgical procedure. When he became Home Secretary in 1910, his enthusiasm was unabated, fired by reading he Sterilisation of Degenerates by Dr H C Sharp with its dire warnings of 'the degenerate class' threatening 'the purity of the race'. In December of that year, he wrote to the Prime Minister, Asquith, in these terms:

I am convinced that the multiplication of the feebleminded [...] unchecked by any of the old restraints of nature, and actually fostered by civilised conditions, is a very terrible danger to the race. [...] The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the Feeble-Minded and Insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate. I feel that the source from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed before another year is passed.

Churchill's enthusiasm for eugenics grew, despite being moved to the Admiralty; he was Vice President of the first International Eugenics Congress held in London in July 1912. He tirelessly lobbied his colleagues advocating for sterilisation of the mentally unfit. However, his efforts to introduce such a measure to the Mental Deficiency Bill 1913 failed, the Act preferring the Commission's recommendation of confinement. Indeed, sterilisation never made its way onto the statute books in Britain (unlike in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States).

Churchill's enthusiasm for such legislation was, strange though it seems now, progressive and liberal principles. 

To his officials, he had advised that sterilisation was morally superior to segregation: 

I think it is cruel to shut up numbers of people in institutions, to them at any rate little better than prisons, for their whole lives, if by a simple surgical operation they could be permitted to live freely in the world without causing much inconvenience to others.

It is not impossible to see how sterilisation might have seemed a more humane response to the 'problem' of feeblemindedness. To liberals and leftists, taking seriously the discoveries of Darwin, worried evolution might, in some circumstances, lead to degeneration, the unchecked spread of biological abnormalities which could lead to the destruction of a people (or, as they would have said then, a race). It was perhaps less clear to the Edwardians than it is to us that the application of Darwin to different types of people is scientifically illiterate, expressive of a deep-seated inhumanity, and resting on a false belief in biology as an explanation of disability.

In any case, eugenics fell dramatically out of favour among progressives in the 1940s because of its association with the Nazis and the 'Final Solution' and such views faded from mainstream debate. 

But not entirely. In Edgbaston in 1974, the Conservative MP Keith Joseph made an infamous speech. He noted

a high and rising proportion of children born to mothers least fitted to bring children into the world and bring them up. They are born to mothers who were first pregnant in adolescence in social classes 4 and 5. Many of these girls are unmarried, many are deserted or divorced or soon will be. Some are of low intelligence, most of low educational attainment.

He argued that the result of these unsuitable mothers was an epidemic of 'problem children, the future unmarried mothers, delinquents, denizens of our borstals, subnormal educational establishments, prisons and hostels for drifters' and noted darkly that 'these mothers, the under-20s in many cases, single parents, from classes 4 and 5, are now producing a third of all births'. The implications that Joseph drew from this were apocalyptic: 'the balance of our population, our human stock is threatened [...] the nation moves towards degeneration'.

It is exactly the same concern expressed by Churchill sixty-four years earlier, in much the same language - and with the same solution: 

proposals to extend birth control facilities to these classes of people, particularly the young unmarried mothers, evokes entirely understandable moral opposition. Is it not condoning immorality? I suppose it is. But which is the lesser evil, until we are able to remoralise whole groups and classes of people, undoing the harm done when already weak restraints on strong instincts are further weakened by permissiveness in television, in film, on bookstalls?

In other words, the population is threatened by degenerates and the only sensible solution is to prevent them from giving birth. Rightly, Keith Joseph was lambasted for his comments. His attempts to clarify and apologise only compounded his fault and the episode dealt a fatal blow to his widely-touted chances to take on the leadership of the Conservatives.

The main beneficiary of his failure was his friend and colleague Margaret Thatcher, who assumed leadership of the economic right-wing of the party and got the leadership less than four months later. Joseph became a key advisor, in part through his personal advocacy, but also through his foundation of the economically liberal Centre of Policy Studies. The influence he had would go on to help Margaret Thatcher get elected in 1979 and bring about the most decisive shift rightward in British politics since the war.

In some ways, this forestalled a different kind of rightward shift. In the unstable 1970s, various right-wing individuals spoke more and more openly about the possibility of a right-wing coup. Most of these people were delusional, but there was a eugenic aspect to their thinking. Eccentric millionaire John Aspinall - and his horrible associates Jimmy Goldsmith and Lord Lucan - liked to refer to the majority of human beings as 'the urban bio-mass'; in a review of a book about their circle, Christopher Bray notes: 'When Richard Nixon told him that a nuclear bomb could kill two million people, Aspinall expressed disappointment that the victims would be so few'. Thatcher never expressed views quite like this, but eugenics has never quite gone away.

Five years ago, the former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party, Howard Flight, who had just been ennobled by David Cameron, offered the Evening Standard thoughts on one unintended consequence of a strong welfare state:

We’re going to have a system where the middle classes are discouraged from breeding because it’s jolly expensive, but for those on benefit there is every incentive. Well, that’s not very sensible.

The same old tropes are here: describing human reproduction like the breeding of cattle; the quasi-racial division of classes; the worries about the middle classes being swamped by the fuckful feckless poor. Flight was, of course, forced to apologise.

And then we have yesterday's budget. One of its well-trailed provisions was to remove any increase in tax credits and housing benefits after a family has two children. This is a view that has been championed by Iain Duncan Smith, so you already know it's a nasty idea. But what does this mean? Why do this?

It comes hard on the heels of five or more years of tabloid scare stories about large working class families. The same old eugenic images are here: the lazy poor, their unrestrained appetites, their freakishly large families compared to middle class restraint: 'Hard-pressed families across the country sit round the kitchen table working out if they can afford another child,' explained a spokesman for the lying fascists The Taxpayers' Alliance, 'and nobody on benefits should be any different.' 

But this isn't eugenics, is it? Putting a cap on benefits is very different from sterilising the poor. Of course it is. It's not the same. But the effect is the same. Note something: they haven't made this retrospective. Any family claiming for more than two children already can continue to do so. The policy kicks in in April 2017. Why? Presumably because it would be unfair to cut the benefits of people who have already made the decision to have these children. But you know what? That's an admission that this is a policy designed to change people's decisions. It's a policy designed to stop the poor from having so many babies.

Churchill and Aspinall were ignored. Keith Joseph and Howard Flight were censured. Who will stand up and name this new policy for what it is? A new economic eugenics.

Enter the Greeks

"Greece runs the risk of bringing an end to the European civilisation that they invented, which would be a tragic irony - something else they invented." Jon Stewart

I write this on the day the Greeks are voting in a referendum on whether to accept the EU, ECB and IMF's grotesque offer to their government, which would continue the austerity economics that has already brought the country to its knees. Who knows what is rhetoric and what is clear-eyed logic, but certainly one possible outcome is Greece leaving the Euro and possibly the EU itself; the co-called Grexit.

But in British theatre, we have the opposite. We have a Grentrance.

2015 looks likely to be the year of the Greeks. The Almeida has just opened Robert Icke's re-telling of Aeschylus's Oresteia. It's following that up with The Bacchae and Medea, a reworked Lysistrata and a one-off performance of the whole of Homer's Iliad. The Iliad is also going to be the given epic theatrical shape by Mike Pearson for the National Theatre of Wales. There's a re-working of Medea at The Gate, who gave us the faux-classical Idomoneus last year. We've had the classical tragedy of A View from the Bridge in the West End already this year. There are Oresteias also at Shakespeare's Globe and Home Manchester and rumours of another coming from National Theatre of Scotland. The Unicorn also has a 'Greek season' with retellings of the Minotaur and Odysseus myths.

Why the Greeks? Why now? Whenever we think about theatre we always reinvent the theatre. It's not as if there are permanent and unambiguous features of Greek plays that we always return to. Every visit to Ancient Greece, we see it with fresh eyes, find new things, pull out new features and find new parts of those plays and that world that resonate for us. So what is today's classical Athens?

Ironically, I think the reason the Greeks seem to be speaking to us so clearly now is austerity. I don't mean by that the economic meaning. I mean austerity in the sense of  unadorned severity. There is something austere that we can find in those plays. Stripped of the fuss of naturalism, the flinty poetry of the work presents a series of archetypal conflicts: individuals against the mass, the dissenter against the state, mothers and against children, husband against wife, brother against sister, men against women, women against men, and everywhere human beings against the Gods and against destiny and against their own fundamental weaknesses.

Somehow these plays - and these productions - do this without pretending to some kind of ahistorical human nature; they remain political. These are conflicts that take place in clustered political worlds, in cities facing political crises in public health, or the conduct of unpopular foreign wars, or the machinations of rival families and factions, in which reputation is as subject to public opinion, to spin doctoring, to brand control as it is now. But they seem to present these conflicts stripped back to a state of bare life. There is a forbidding darkness as these figures move forward in pursuit of their ideals. Resentments are kept preserved over years, justice is meted out with implacable brutality; everywhere we see civilisation as the other side of barbarism and the characters struggle their way to negotiate between them.

So when I say I don't mean austerity in the economic sense, that's not quite true. Austerity economics is a world of intense, friendless cruelty. If Euripides had written a play about the current treatment of Greece, he'd have drawn our attention to the arbitrary, implacable and brutal decisions of the IMF just as he presents the insanity of the Gods in Iphigenia in Aulis.  If Sophocles were to write about today's referendum, he'd tell a story about people standing up against a tyrant trying to starve dissenters into submission and it is likely that play would end up looking very like Antigone. 

The advocates of austerity economics like to present it as simple common sense rather than the right-wing ideology policy that it is. It's an extreme form of Thatcherism. That's right, an extreme form. It is based on a neoliberal commitment to minimising the state as far as possible to a series of safeguards against private property (some laws, a police force) that sees anything more as an unacceptably socialistic attempt to buck the market that will always fail. These people genuinely believe that if you removed all unemployment benefit, people would find jobs; that if you make people pay directly for their own healthcare, they will try much harder not to get sick; that if you removed all arts subsidy, the private sector will simply - and much more efficiently - step in to provide the same or better.

I think they honestly think austerity makes economic sense, despite the fact that there is zero evidence of it. Greece has been running an austerity policy for five years and it's completely run into the ground. It didn't work in Britain; we had the slowest exit from a recession in our history and only started to recover when Osborne backed down from his most hardline approach. America had a much faster exit, because they didn't go down the austerity route. The issue is I think they also think austerity makes moral sense. They find it morally disgusting for someone to spend years on benefits - not, as you and I probably do, because people should be able to get good, rewarding jobs, but because they think welfare makes people lazy and austerity improves everyone's moral character. And, trying to imagine what it would be like to be an austeriarch, I think that if they ever have any doubts about the economic sense, they can comfort themselves that it's still morally good.

The problem is that we're so far from the foundation of the Welfare State in the 1940s that we've lost that collective memory of what life was like in the 1930s without it. Someone who was 21 when the Beveridge Report was published, in 1942, would be 94 today. There aren't many of them around to remind us that when you deny people a basic standard of health, income, nourishment, cleanliness, culture and work the whole society suffers. Austerity is immoral and humiliating and makes societies much worse. This convenient historical amnesia allows the delusional cheerleaders for free markets in everything to believe that reducing people to bare life will only be good for us. The Greeks remind us what a cold universe it is if our fate is in the hands of arbitrary and capricious judgments from our jealous and temperamental divinities, whether they sit in Brussels or Parnassus, Frankfurt or Olympus. The Greek tragic austerity is a way of showing us the horror of our own Austerity.

Robert Icke's retelling of Aeschylus's Oresteia is a completely captivating. It's a broad open stage, with two receding upstage spaces, shielded from us by translucent sliding screens, a witty contemporary take on the classical paraskenia. A long table dominates the stage for the first couple of hours, the family dining table around which we see a series of fraught meals, but also becomes a balcony for a returning hero and a deathbed for a murdered girl. The language is spare and clear, unfussy, unadorned. The text gives plenty of space for fascinating, horrifying scenes, like the one in which Agamemnon is persuaded to kill his daughter Iphigenia. This is hard enough to take in the original, so I wondered how this contemporary version could possibly make this plausible, but, with a terrible remorseless and cynical politician's logic, Agememnon's advisor makes the choice seem unavoidable. Oh God and the murder itself is devastating, precisely because it is so unfussy, so clinical, so caring; Iphigenia is put to death like a wounded dog, sitting on her father's knee, taking the tablets, slipping slowly away.

It's a real ensemble piece but I can't not mention Lia Williams as Clytemnestra and Angus Wright; she the ferocious politician's wife but with steel in her mind and a savage sensuousness; he the awkward, burdened statesman keeping nothing together, not his family, barely his state, trapped by circumstance. Jessica Brown Findlay is an astonishingly powerful, sexy, brooding Electra whose repeated emptying of a wine bottle into a decanter is a warning, an accusation, and a bodycount. The design is sensational: Hildegard Bechtler's screens give us shades and shadows of other lives and doubles the on-stage characters as ghosts and echoes. Natasha Chivers has produced perhaps the best lighting design I've seen in a theatre this decade. A series of pulses and punches, the lights ruthlessly expose the characters and their stories, the air itself feels like steel. I'd be surprised if I have a better evening at the theatre this year.

A reminder though of the stark choices that we have to make in this austere world. I hope the Greeks today vote for dignity against austerity, for democracy against tyranny, for Antigone against Creon.