Comment on The Experiment: Can Shock Become Change? by Colin Hambrook

With all due respect to presenters Mat Fraser and Sophie Morgan and the Director Richard Butchins, Channel 4’s The Experiment was a massive missed opportunity. In some respects the reality tv program actually played a real disservice to the millions of disabled people and children in this country who suffered the day-to-day torture inflicted on them within State and subsequently NHS run, so-called ‘care’ institutions, hospitals and special schools within Britain since the County Asylums Act of 1808, the Blind and Deaf Children Act 1893 and the Defective and Epileptic Children Act 1899.

The Experiment failed to reference the actual systemic neglect, abuse, and regulatory oversight failures, which remain deeply entrenched within British disability institutions and supported living facilities that exist today. Official reviews, media investigations, and watchdog data persistently reveal that individuals with learning difficulties, neurodivergence, and complex needs continue to experience severe human rights violations due to unsafe staffing, inadequate training, and institutional inertia. I know from personal experience that even the best of institutional facilities, today, are underfunded and underresourced. The emphasis on ‘straight-jacketing’ individuals with the chemical kosh, remains the key NHS policy for containing disabled individuals.

Why is it that every time the Disability Movement wants to explain ableism it defaults to the Nazi efforts under Hitler to eradicate disabled people? It reminds me of the ‘don’t mention the war’ sketch in Fawlty Towers in the mid-1970s when John Cleese’s character Basil, cannot stop himself from repeatedly bringing up World War II to his German hotel guests. Yes, Hitler took eugenic policies to their ultimate conclusion and Hartheim remains a shocking museum recording the horrors of factory killing. However, the fact that disabled people were the guinea pigs for the Jewish Holocaust is a crucial fact that the programme failed to mention. Crucial, because in my mind, at least, it mirrors debates about the Assisted Dying Bill and the ways in which the government continue to ‘test the waters’ in gauging how much they can get away with eliminating the ‘useless eaters’ of today. I say this mainly because palliative care has only ever been fractionally funded by the NHS and remains majorly the project of charity funding. Could it be that successive governments since the institution of the NHS remain ambivalent about supporting individuals through death and dying. In truth, the undercurrent of eugenic ideals has always remained at the heart of how leaders of this country have continued to think.

We like to pretend that Hitler’s eugenic T4 programe was an aberration unique to German politics in the 1930s and divert attention completely from the fact that the Nazi regime explicitly borrowed its legislative blueprints, legal concepts, and scientific ideas from the American eugenics movement of the early 20th century. We fail to recall that key British politicians like Winston Churchill were deeply influenced by early eugenic theories and argued that the “feeble-minded” and “insane” threatened the racial health and strength of Britain. Churchill served as an honorary vice president of the British Eugenics Society and advocated for measures to address “race deterioration” and reduce poverty through selective breeding. When he was Home Secretary in 1910 he wrote to the Prime Minister H.H. Asquith advocating for the custodial segregation or compulsory sterilization of people deemed “feeble-minded”. He viewed sterilization at the time as a way to prevent the growth of what he considered hereditary social and mental defects. Instead of sterilization, Parliament passed the Mental Deficiency Act 1913, which relied on institutional confinement.

In the early 20th century, the eugenics movement gained widespread support across the political spectrum, drawing figures from conservative, progressive, socialist, and fascist backgrounds. Sidney and Beatrice Webb (British Fabian socialists and political reformers) integrated eugenic ideas into early socialist blueprints, viewing state-directed reproduction as a way to manage working-class populations. Arthur Balfour (British Prime Minister) expressed sympathy for eugenic principles and the goals of improving national genetic stock. William Beveridge (British economist and social reformer) sat on the Eugenics Society Consultative Council and incorporated eugenic thinking into early welfare state proposals.

The Experiment was lazy. Why didn’t Mat and Sophie and the program-makers do some meaningful research, rather than resorting to a specific history that has become a significator for oppression that diverts attention from the truth, that as a society we have consistently failed our disabled and elderly members as a matter of policy for the last 200 years. Churchill and his ilke would have got away with factory killing here, if the appetite for it had been stronger. You only have to visit Wakefield’s Mental Health Museum to witness the results of the inhumane policies of successive British politicians with eugenic ideals at the heart of their thinking. Housed on the grounds of Fieldhead Hospital the collection within the museum originated from the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum (later Stanley Royd Hospital), where it was first established in 1974. It contains a host of torture devices, a padded cell, machines for electrocuting and drilling holes into peoples brains; enough evidence to make you question the depth of horrors ableist principles can stoop to, justified in the name of ‘care’.

Compared to the brutal reality of British asylums before their 1990s closure, the fake SegriLife facility in ‘The Experiment’ represents ‘a jolly day in’. Mat and Sophie wait to see if the public brought to experience the institution and the actors posing as inmates will finally wake up to the fact that this proposed care model is oppressive. To any disabled person, especially perhaps, those who suffered through the asylums and special schools before Thatcher’s 1990 Care in the Community Act shifted people into residential homes, the conclusion is already obvious: the entire experiment is a waste of time.

Disability scholars and activists, such as Michael Oliver and Mark Priestley have argued that the 1990 Act was fundamentally an exercise in state cost-containment. They note that the 1990 Act’s “internal market” simply replaced old medical institutions with a new market-driven bureaucracy. Local authorities became “rationing agents” whose primary job was managing capped budgets, rather than empowering disabled people. Those oppressive institutions that ‘The Experiment’ makes an attempt to replicate were not closed for humanitarian reasons. They were closed because the central social security budget went from £11 million in 1979 to over £2 billion by 1990. The Act capped expenditure by transferring funds into fixed, cash-limited grants given directly to local councils and shifted the onus of responsibility from ‘free’ NHS Care to Means-Tested Local Authority Care. By shifting disabled people out of hospitals and into the community, their needs were reclassified as “social care” under the responsibility of local authorities.

On a unit basis, providing a citizen with domiciliary care (in-home support, meals on wheels, or day centres) was mathematically far cheaper for the state than maintaining an acute hospital bed or funding 24/7 institutional institutionalisation. The financial logic dictated that the state should only fund the specific gaps in a person’s capability rather than funding their entire housing, food, and domestic existence inside a state facility.

The question still remains as to why the tide is turning and our societies appetite for reintroducing state-controlled facilities for containing disabled people is gaining ground. The answer seems obvious to me, at least. As globally fascist thinking becomes more and more embedded as an undercurrent within BBC News and media outlets more generally; as fascist dictators continue to infiltrate and take over political power under a smoke screen of democracy in the so-called ‘free world’, so cruelty becomes a justified modus operandi dictating the world that citizens have to cope with.

The central question mirrored in The Experiment is how advertising replicating fascist viewpoints can influence the general public. It seems obvious, yes, of course it will, if it is presented slickly enough. However, the real question that needs addressing is how do we collectively turn things around. As billionaire fascists who run global economies continue to make experiments of all of us through their social media outlets and increasingly fascistic influence on global politics, how do we stand up and say ‘no’? The prevailing tide pushes conflict at every level across every political issue. The one valid point that The Experiment alludes to, without clearly stating, is that disabled people have always been and will continue to be, at the frontline of significant changes in how society conducts itself, for better and worse.