UK Prime Minister Tony Blair has caught some flack recently for suggesting that the government should intervene early in the lives of problematic families and teenage mothers out of which children could grow up to be a “menace to society” and “a threat to themselves”, even if it means intervening “pre-birth”.
So far it is all a little vague, allowing veteran Laborite and former MP Tony Benn, to respond that “[t]his one about identifying troublesome children in the foetus - this is eugenics, the sort of thing Hitler talked about.” Well, the kind of talk Benn thinks he is hearing actually goes back a bit further than Hitler - see, for example, Edwin Black’s “War Against the Weak” - but until Blair clarifies what he is on about, the accusations will continue to fly. What we do know for now is that the guardians of potential troublemakers - by definition current troublemakers themselves, including those with troubles of a drug- and alcohol-related variety - could be forced to take some form of “help” before it is too late.
Blair was backed by his Social Exclusion Minister, Hilary Armstrong, who proclaimed previous efforts by the government at raising “many, many people out of dire poverty and worklessness” had been a success and it now needed to give them “the ability to see what they can do to raise their children’s opportunities”. (Surely the latter goes hand in hand with the former?) Further, there “is a group at the bottom that no government has previously effectively tackled and we are now taking the next step”.
It will be interesting to see how this all plays out, with Blair due to outline his plan in a speech this Tuesday. I think that the main argument will be - unsurprisingly - whether even more government intervention is required to prevent problems, or is in fact the former a major reason for much of the mess in the first place?
