The Undesirables: the law that locked away a generation
By Sarah Wise
Published by Oneworld Publications, 2024, £22
Reviewed by Leah Byatt
The social care sector should play a valuable and essential role in society, ensuring disadvantaged layers of our communities can access the resources and support they need for a secure, healthy, and meaningful existence. But it is a sector that is vastly underfunded under the capitalist system, leading to exploitation of workers and service users alike.
The Undesirables shines a light on a shameful history. Highlighting key developments over the past hundred years, it helps contextualise how we’ve reached the stage we have with the social care sector today.
Sarah Wise explores how the popularity of eugenics – the belief that behaviours and habits deemed as ‘socially unacceptable’ occur because of hereditary rather than environmental factors – grew in the early 1900s, with influential advocates such as the young Winston Churchill. We learn how this was a major contributing factor behind the development of the Mental Deficiency Act, passed by the Liberal government in 1913. The Act set out arrangements for dealing with those considered to be “mentally defective” – “idiots”, “imbeciles”, “feeble-minded persons”, and “moral imbeciles”. It was presented as being principally concerned with the provision of appropriate accommodation for those deemed unable to support themselves independently.
But the reality of the Act meant the most vulnerable layers of society were at risk of being institutionalised, in some cases for life. Men and women were deliberately separated and sterilisation enforced to prevent ‘unwanted births’ that eugenicists warned would lead to more undesirable ‘mental defectives’ plaguing society. The state essentially wanted to work towards eradicating ‘undesirable’ citizens for good, to remove the need for state-funded care provision and reduce future social care costs. The hope was that what would remain would be a working class of efficient labourers who could independently sustain themselves and their families and churn out profit for the higher classes.
Wise exposes individuals who were key figures in the workers’ movement of the time, such as the Labour leader Keir Hardie who abstained on the legislation. Despite warnings that the Act could present new ways to exploit the working class and used to shut away a large portion of society, only three MPs voted against when it was passed in 1913.
During early conception, many of these mental deficiency colonies, a lot of which already existed as remnants of the Victorian-era lunatic asylums, were essentially compulsory labour camps. Those certified as mentally deficient were forced to carry out unpaid ‘therapeutic’ labour such as textiles, agriculture, cleaning, etc.
As the first world war progressed and the war budget grew, less money than originally anticipated was allocated to the running of these institutions. So many of the ‘feeble-minded’ women who wound up there due to having children out of wedlock ended up taking on the roles of caregivers to those who were less able.
Here we see how the double oppression women have faced repeatedly under capitalism strikes again. No regard was shown to the women experiencing the trauma of having their children and liberty removed, and their societal status as caregivers was exploited for free labour, for the ‘crime’ of birthing a child against the state expectations that all children should be born into a nuclear family unit. The fathers of such illegitimate children faced no punishment at all. In many of these cases the women had been victims of rape, incest, and sexual exploitation to begin with, and their institutionalisation added to their lifelong, irreversible trauma.
The social care sector continues to be dominated by women workers, in part due to the historic role we have played in the sector as exploited workers. Historical stereotypes, discrimination, and lack of childcare and other service provision, mean that we are still concentrated in low-paid, physically and mentally exhausting jobs as caregivers in either unpaid or low-wage forms.
The Undesirables includes accounts from case studies that for myself, as a social care worker born and raised in Doncaster, are alarmingly close to home. St Catherine’s Mental Deficiency Institution, located just outside of Doncaster in the 1930s and 1940s, is documented as making masses of profits for the government’s Wheat Commission and the Potato Marketing Board, as residents were expected to grow produce on the sixty-five acres of land across the colony. It was so successful that it became a registered producer run entirely on slave labour. St Catherine’s today hosts community group sessions supporting adults with learning disabilities to maintain gardens and allotments. On the surface this appears to be quite a welcoming scheme, but it starts to feel a little harrowing when you discover what once took place there.
There are reports of institutions in the 1920s and 1930s that only had one or two paid staff employed to oversee their running. The rest of the work to sustain the colonies was carried out entirely by the residents themselves for extremely low levels of pay or totally free labour. Trade unions began to raise concerns in the 1940s that paid staff were being deliberately laid off in favour of this much cheaper form of labour.
The 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s saw insitutionalised care come under increased criticism. In Britain, ironically, it was Margaret Thatcher who implemented care in the community, following audits and reports that made the case for significant advantages to domiciliary care. This liberated many from the institutions in which they had previously been imprisoned, allowing community integration to take place and a more dignified means of life for many of those who had once been oppressed by the Mental Deficiency Act.
Thatcher, of course, didn’t do this out of empathy towards the oppressed, but under the belief it would be a cost-effective solution, removing the need for the running of large institutions. Nonetheless, regardless of who implemented it and the profit-based reasons behind it, this should have been a positive step forward for vulnerable layers of society as it provided the ability for citizens to receive support and care in their own homes and in integrated communities, and a major chance to develop true independence and a role in society.
However, many were released into the care of the community without the infrastructure to support those who needed it to actually integrate into communities; and those who had been locked away for – in some instances – decades, were too institutionalised to be able to adapt to modern life. This led to further mass neglect and poverty.
As Sarah Wise reveals in her summary, and as most workers operating in the social care sector like myself will have observed, abuse is still happening right up to the modern day. In the mid-2010s care homes for the elderly were shut down after negligence and abuse was exposed via secret recordings made by family members of the residents.
And let’s not forget the pandemic. That further exposed the failings of the health and social care sector, with healthcare settings hit the hardest. Masses of profits were made from care homes while residents and workers were left to literally die in undignified conditions.
How is the situation looking today? Capitalism continues to fail us. Social care provision for people with special educational needs, for the elderly, children etc, continues to be dominated by the private sector. The entire workforce is understaffed, and turnover is enormous as working conditions continue to be poor, with low wages, lack of workplace health and safety measures, and high workloads. As a result, the most vulnerable layers of society continue to receive below-adequate care. Lack of basic resources such as housing, jobs, and health services, and the stress of living in a capitalist society, mean more and more people are requiring social care support than ever before.
These problems cannot be resolved by a system in crisis in which profit comes before social needs. This would require socialist solutions to ensure that adequate resources were directed towards social care provision as well as providing jobs, homes, and other public services for all. But a step in the right direction now would be for social care provision to be taken out of the hands of the profiteers and brought into public ownership. The trade unions should be fighting for this as well as a labour movement inquiry into the failures over the past hundred years that have deprived many of their freedom and liberty, exposing the shameful history that Sarah Wise brings to light in The Undesirables.