‘History should not be sanitised’ say some historically illiterate Tory MPs. Churchill, a great leader as he certainly was, was also a rabid eugenicist who drafted the Mental Deficiency Act 1913. https://twitter.com/greg_jenner/status/1325757495328059392

The sterilisation proposals drafted by Churchill were removed at the third reading. That is how close the U.K. had to having formal eugenics policies, at Churchill’s behest.

This was part of long history of Churchill promoting eugenics policy. In 1910, he asked the Home Office to look into sterilisation of the “Feeble-Minded”, based on Indiana-based eugenics legislation.

Concerned with “the “multiplication of the unfit” Churchill estimated that 120,000 ‘feeble minded’ people should be “segregated under proper conditions so that their curse died with them and was not transmitted to future generations.”

1911: Churchill put to Parliament the need to introduce compulsory labour camps for “mental defectives” and “labour camps” for “tramps and wastrels”.

In 1912, he spoke of using “Roentgen rays” - X-rays - on “feeble minded” women and men to prevent them breeding.