The right has a quasi-mystical belief that the poor are inferior – sterilis​ation​ is the logical next step

Eugenics gets a bad rap because of its unfortunate Nazi heritage and antiquated, confusing language – “purity”, “bloodlines” – where you can never immediately tell whether they are talking about people or horses. The more commonplace eugenicist, who merely wants poor people to stop breeding, barely gets a look in. Yet they can ascend quite high, quite fast, up the ranks of the party of government.

Ben Bradley, vice-chair of the Conservative party, fretted in 2012 that the nation was “drowning in a sea of unemployed wasters” – metaphors from the natural world (floods, seas, insects, tides, swarms) are an absolute staple of the eugenics diet, as they are for racists. It is always hard to conjure a proper, full-blooded hatred for other people on a case-by-case basis. You have to transform them into a vast force, united by a shared, destructive agenda. Conundrum: wasters, presumably, have no agenda. But tolerate enough wasting, and soon there is a sea of it.

Anyway, his fix was for unemployed people to have vasectomies. As interim women’s officer for the Eugenics-Concern movement, I would like to know what the sterilisation offer is for women, or whether, as with universal credit, this is a breadwinner-family model, wherein any unwanted fertility of the underclass should be tackled at its source – the testicle.

It only seems like a short time ago (nine days) that a board member of the universities regulator resigned, following reports of his attendance at a secret eugenics conference. The newly unemployed Toby Young came stoutly to his own defence; he was just sitting at the back during the dodgy symposium; the “intelligence” conference he spoke at was “super-respectable”. Sorry, that was unfair: he is not unemployed and nobody here thinks he should have a vasectomy. He has another job, with which his views are totally compatible. He is director of the mainly government-funded New Schools Network, supporting free schools within the English state sector. So if he thinks intelligence is pre-determined, evidenced by household income, and it is reasonable to at least give those at the bottom the choice to snuff out their sub-standard offspring before they are born, that wouldn’t be a problem at all.

This is what kite-flying is all about; sometimes you find a new bit of sky, other times you veer off course and get tangled with a drone.

Bradley is tasked with attracting young people to the Conservative party, for which he would have to come up with some eye-catching ideas, in the absence of “anything good for young people”. Yet this quasi-mystical belief in the poor as inherently inferior, morally polluting and intellectually diluting the national bloodstream is both the logical conclusion and the theoretical underpinning of the modern right. If hardship is all about individual failure and opportunity is working perfectly well, how do you account for such radical divergence in outcome, except by a radical difference in input?

The godfather of it all is the American political scientist Charles Murray, big in the 90s for zingers such as: “What’s holding back [the poor] is that they’re not bright enough to be physicians.” He is Rupert Murdoch’s ideas-mentor (Murray, along with Niall Ferguson, were the two authors Murdoch passed on to Trump, back in the day when people still thought he read). It is a credo in which the poor are poor because they “sit in their undershirts, drinking”, while the rich are drinking higher quality alcohol and wearing sports jackets, so, you know, QED. In a novel, the hubris (“I’m rich ergo I’m brilliant”) would get a comical comeuppance; in real life, it ends in unfathomable darkness (“It would be better if those poor people weren’t alive, because they’re obviously stupid”). This is why novels are more nourishing than engaging in politics, but they are not lucrative to either read or write, so if this is your plan, remember not to have children.

Trump’s sweary problem with bad plumbing

Donald Trump has taken his yearly medical and aced everything: he has invented a new measurement of height, the Trump Inch, in which he is 6’3”. Barack Obama, at 6’1”, always appeared the taller man, but he was using the fake inch. The president also scored 100% in a test designed to detect cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s disease. But, we could have guessed that from the devilish sophistication in his “shithole” argument.

Some clarifications had already emerged: he only called unspecified African countries “shitholes”; of Haiti, he merely said: “We don’t need any more Haitians,” which is fine, because if you call a series of unrelated foreign countries shitholes, that makes you sound quite xenophobic, whereas if all your shitholes are clustered on the same continent, that is geopolitical analysis.

Yet there’s more. Now White House officials are saying the word was not “shithole” but “shithouse”, and was a specific reference to paucity of infrastructure, specifically plumbing.

The good news for the free world is threefold: first, to deny calling a country a shithole means you know that it is bad to call a country a shithole. Someone in this administration knows right from wrong.

Second, it is quite a fine point of difference, between “bad place” and “place with bad plumbing”. It has the close attention to detail of a legal mind. Therefore, not all the legal minds have been fired. Third, “shithole countries” has been a common racist chant for ages on the alt-right alter-web (I have a screengrab of Jo Marney, ex-first lady of Ukip, accusing someone of coming from one in 2016), which raises the spectre of Trump spending his life roaming around online hate swamps, looking for ideas.

This turns out not to be true: he spends his downtime thinking about modern amenities, as so many reasonable people do.

Playground wisdom to live by

I have just discovered Greater Good magazine, science-based advice for leading a better life. It’s full of lists: Five Ways to Be More Inspiring, Three Surprising Habits of Happy People, Seven Ways to Raise Children Who Are More Tolerant Than You, some of which I would dispute on principle (I don’t want my children to be more tolerant than me; I tolerate them and they are outrageous). However, some of it is gold, including one way to be more authentic – “Know your own truth and stay out of other people’s”. Very close analysis (I read it all the way through) reveals what this means – “Mind your own business”. While we are rediscovering playground wisdom, can I add: “He who smelt it also dealt it”. And “your mum”.