Pip: If you've ever wondered how a late-Victorian debating society connects to modern arguments about who should raise your children, thestealingofemily.co.uk has been doing the digging — and the answers are not comfortable.

Mara: Martin Newbold's recent work traces the ideological roots of state paternalism — the Fabian Society, eugenics, and the belief that experts know better than parents. Let's start with where that idea came from.

The Fabian Society and the Roots of State Paternalism

Pip: The question this post is really asking is: where does the phrase "we can look after your children better than you" actually come from? Because it didn't appear from nowhere — it has a specific intellectual ancestry.

Mara: The post sets the context precisely. Founded in 1884 by Sidney Webb, Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, and H.G. Wells, the Fabians believed in state-guided social planning — and the post quotes the core logic directly: "the state, guided by scientific experts, was seen as more capable of raising healthy, useful citizens than poor, 'unfit,' or ignorant parents."

Pip: So the upshot is that state removal of children wasn't framed as cruelty — it was framed as science. That's the move that makes it so durable and so dangerous.

Mara: And the post is careful about scope. It draws a hard line: these views belong to roughly 1890 to 1930. After Nazi eugenics made the consequences visible, the Fabian Society and mainstream socialism rejected coercive eugenics completely. Modern voluntary assisted dying debates have no connection to that earlier framework.

Pip: Shaw apparently suggested the state should decide who may have children. Wells argued for discouraging the "unfit" from reproducing. These weren't fringe positions — they were the intellectual mainstream of progressive thought at the time.

Mara: Which is exactly what makes the phrase so loaded when it resurfaces today. The post connects this directly to proposals that followed: state-run boarding schools, removal of children from certain families, restrictions on who could become a parent.

Pip: History as a mirror nobody asked for.

Mara: The post sits alongside related pieces on child welfare and state power — including one asking where 758,000 children have gone, and another examining why the Department for Education is paying local authorities for children. Together they build a picture of a system whose philosophical foundations are older and stranger than most people realise.

Pip: The numbers and the ideology — those two threads are worth holding together.

Mara: That's exactly where the next episode picks up.

Pip: Gradual reform, scientific expertise, the state that knows best — it turns out those ideas have very long shadows.

Mara: And the questions being asked now about children, data, and state power look a lot less modern once you know where they started.