What does a sitting Labour MP, a multimillion charitable trust, and the most prominent UK-based pro-assisted dying lobby group have in common? It turns out, quite a lot actually – and all of them may be about to ruin your favourite confectionery treat forever.
However, the string of perturbing connections the Canary is about to reveal has far more alarming, and dangerous implications. This is because it exposes the shocking eugenics origins and links of the foremost pro-assisted dying organisation in the UK – Dignity in Dying.
Worse still, it sheds light on the fact that eugenics is the thread weaving through its long history – and still casts a shadow over it to this day.
In particular, it revolves around one famous family who is still a key backer of the group, and also supports other organisations that grew out of the eugenics movement. It’s vital context ahead of the second parliamentary reading on Kim Leadbeater’s assisted dying bill. Most importantly, it underscores all the more why MPs must take chronically ill and disabled people’s concerns about a slippery slope of assisted suicide, extremely seriously in the upcoming vote.
Assisted dying: the eugenics origin of a prolific lobby group
Before the Canary irrevocably wrecks your go-to cocoa snack, we should first delve into Dignity in Dying’s eugenist genesis.
Dignity in Dying started out in 1935 – but then it went by the name the Voluntary Euthanasia Legalisation Society (VELS). It later became the Voluntary Euthanasia Society (VES), before changing its name in 2005 to its modern day counterpart. Then chief executive Deborah Annetts revealed the new name in tandem with the announcement of its new patrons. On this, she hinted back to the VELS’s origins:
Our two religious patrons connect us with our roots because we were set up by Churchmen
However, what Annetts didn’t publicise is that these ‘churchmen’ were also active eugenicists. One was Dr Killick Millard – who also later served as president of VELS. He was a Eugenics Society associate, member, and part of its council for multiple periods.
Canadian historian Ian Dowbiggin has previously explored Millard’s eugenicist beliefs. As Live Action reported:
Dowbiggin found that “in principle he was not against the notion of euthanasia without consent nor was he unalterably opposed to applying euthanasia for eugenic purposes to young children with mental or emotional deficiencies.” Millard also celebrated the high infant mortality rates of “slum dwellers” because it ensured they would not threaten “the quality of the race.”
Labour peer Lord Arthur Ponsonby was another founding member. As the Spectator wrote, he:
put forward the Voluntary Euthanasia Bill in 1936, arguing against the ‘mistaken notion’ that the Bill was about sparing people pain, insisting that it was really about ‘being a burden’, intended for those who ‘are no longer of any use’.
Worse still, it’s not only Millard and Ponsonby Dignity in Dying has seemingly hidden from its history. Co-founder of VES Dr Charles John Bond was a consultant surgeon at Leicestershire Royal Infirmary. Crucially, he was another Eugenics Society associate, member, fellow, and vice-president.
Bond sat on the Committee to establish the Bureau of Human Heredity and wrote a number of racist eugenics-orientated publications. For instance, this included one titled: ‘Causes of Racial Decay’.
In a 1930 speech at the Modern Churchmen’s conference, Bond’s ableist, classist eugenicist beliefs were on full display. He purportedly told the conference that:
sterilisation… should be applied to cases of irresponsible persons of
low intelligence and weak will.
In short, Dignity in Dying began life as an organisation neck-deep in the abhorrent racist, classist, ableist eugenics movement. Naturally, it’s not a fact the group likes to shout about today.
Death by… Cadbury’s chocolate?
However, its founders aren’t the only problematic part of its sordid racist, ableist, and classist history. There’s more it can’t sugarcoat about its eugenicist past – as well as its millionaire-funded lobbying present.
Let’s get this out of the way. The unexpected common denominator in all this is the family best known for inventing Britain’s most-beloved chocolate brand: Cadbury’s.
To start with, splashed across Dignity in Dying’s sister charity Compassion in Dying’s accounts is the GW Cadbury Trust. Between 2017 and 2021, it handed the organisation £43,158. It didn’t donate to the non-profit in 2022, or 2023.
Edward Cadbury Junior, and George Cadbury Junior set up the trust in 1922. The brothers were heirs to the Cadbury’s legacy, as grandsons to the chocolate manufacturer founder John Cadbury. It’s George Cadbury Junior the world has to thank for Cadbury’s Dairy Milk. He and his research and development team launched it in 1905.
On the face of it, there’s nothing necessarily shady about a wealthy family setting up a trust for philanthropic purposes. Having said that, philanthropy itself is often paternalistic, and there is a problem with the capitalist penchant for concentrating wealth in the hands of the few. Nonetheless, the Cadbury’s family were Quakers, and many engaged in campaigns for various progressive social reforms. What’s more, early Cadbury’s is synonymous with concerted advocacy on workers’ rights – as per the legacy of Bourneville village.
However, less well publicised is that some of its members were also wrapped up in the Eugenics Society. And alarmingly, it was in these eugenics circles that the Cadbury’s family appear to have come to support the concept of voluntary euthanasia – or as advocates today are euphemistically calling it – assisted dying.
The Voluntary Euthanasia Society and Cadbury’s
George Cadbury Junior’s wife was a member of the Birmingham Hereditary Society, the Eugenics Society’s most prominent provincial branch. So too George and Edward’s eldest brother Laurence John Cadbury was a fellow of the Eugenics Society.
In Laurence’s case, records show that he was a fellow from 1937 through to at least 1977. He was on the society’s council between 1938-39, 1941-44, and 1947-49. Most significantly, he was vice-president of the Eugenics Society for two stints between 1945-46, and 1950-51.
Crucially, Laurence is one of the first links of the Cadbury’s family to the VES. Specifically, in 1971, he signed “The Case for Voluntary Euthanasia” by then VES chair Benjamin Downing in Catholic journal New Blackfriars. Notably then, it was at the same time he was a member of the Eugenics Society, that he also came out in support of euthanasia.
However, this was just the beginning. These were hardly the only connections members of the Cadbury’s family had to eugenicist-originating causes.
Yet more eugenics in assisted dying
The GW Cadbury’s Trust appears to take its namesake from George Cadbury Junior’s son George Woodall Cadbury. He was born in 1907 – so would have been 15 at the time his father and uncle established the trust. Unsurprisingly, he became a trustee for the trust.
Like his mother and uncle, George was a Eugenics Society fellow, showing in its records from 1965 and 1977.
It’s with George that another eugenicist founded organisation came into play as well. Live Action’s article on the VES’s eugenics origins compared it to Planned Parenthood with its eugenicist founder Margaret Sanger. But it turns out, there are actually links between the two groups as well.
Sanger’s engagement with this racist, ableist, classist ideology entangled an organisation that’s ostensible aims purportedly revolved around women’s reproductive rights, with eugenicist notions of forced sterilisation. In other words, birth control in this context moved towards state arbitration over poor, migrant, racially minoritised, and disabled women’s bodies. Essentially, it was the antithesis of the progressive ideals Planned Parenthood claims to espouse.
Obviously, it doesn’t mean that it operates with these eugenicist views now. Nonetheless it’s a complex and controversial legacy that the organisation mustn’t shy away from if it’s committed to genuine reproductive rights and liberation for women and people who menstruate today.
But Sanger is not the end of its eugenics history either. Enter George Woodall Cadbury. He was a Canadian economist, and chief economics advisor to the Province of Saskatchewan. According to his obituary in the New York Times, he helped the country’s first socialist government set up a health care system. But George was also an international leader in Planned Parenthood. He was chairman of the International Planned Parenthood Federation and honorary director of Planned Parenthood Federation of Canada.
Population control rears its head
His involvement in Planned Parenthood is littered with uncomfortable contradictions, likely borne out of his eugenicist leanings. On the one hand, George and his wife Barbara led the campaign to remove contraception from Canada’s criminal code. On the other, they:
had long been associated with work on behalf of population control.
Barbara Cadbury also co-edited International Planned Parenthood News alongside Sanger. Their work on this contributed to the launch of the International Planned Parenthood Federation in Bombay, in 1952. Of course, it was likely no accident Sanger and others established the IPPF in India either. After all, it was arguably the Western colonialist petri dish of racist coerced sterilisations in the Global South. Naturally, it’s an atrocious moment of Malthusian population control history in which the IPPF played a part.
Why does all this matter in the context of Dignity in Dying? For one, it’s George’s eponymous trust that funds the work of its sister charity today.
However, there are more significant connections between George Woodall Cadbury’s eugenics associations and the organisation today calling for legalising assisted suicide. One of these was the fact that at King’s College, Cambridge, he was:
personal pupil of John Maynard Keynes
Keynes was another Eugenics Society member, in his case, a life fellow, and at various points vice-president and director. Not only this however, but Keynes was also an early supporter of the VELS.
Cadbury descendants supporting assisted dying today
Today, George Woodall Cadbury’s daughters and grandchildren have carried his work on birth control forward too.
Caroline Ann Woodroffe and Lyndall Elizabeth Boal, their husbands, and some of their children are now the GW Cadbury Trust’s trustees. It’s still a regular funder to Planned Parenthood. In 2023 for instance, it donated £5,155 to the organisation. Incidentally, Caroline also penned her father’s obituary for the Guardian, lionising his and wife Barbara’s long-term work with Planned Parenthood.
What’s more, Woodroffe has continued in the tradition of her parent’s work in various women’s sexual health and fertility job roles. One that stands out is her former chairship of the Birth Control Trust. This is because, once again, it’s another organisation with a direct line back to the eugenics movement. The Galton Institute founded it in 1977, and crucially, the institute was none other than the Eugenics Society in shiny new wrapping. Only, its new namesake was hardly a break from its eugenics provenance either. Instead, it was a hat tip to yet another rampant early eugenicist, Francis Galton.
And in the legacy of her forebears’ nexus of eugenics, birth and population control, as well as voluntary euthanasia, Woodroffe too has ties to the modern-day rebranding of the VES.
Specifically, she appears to have thrown her support behind Dignity in Dying’s call for legalising assisted suicide for terminally ill patients. In particular, as an epidemiologist, she signed the Dignity in Dying instigated Healthcare Professionals for Assisted Dying (HPAD) campaign in support of the organisation’s aims in 2012.
Her name doesn’t appear in its more recent webpage iterations. However, the organisation appears to have pared down the information it publicises on its supporters more generally across its website.
A Cadbury family legacy – now in parliament
Other Cadbury descendants have also dabbled in divvying out donations to Dignity in Dying. John Crosfield was another grandchild to George Cadbury Snr, alongside George Woodall Cadbury. Crosfield’s mother – Eleanor Cadbury – was sister to GW Cadbury Charitable Trust founders George Cadbury Jnr and Edward Cadbury Jnr. And Crosfield’s son – Richard – wrote a book about his father’s life. In this he put that John Crosfield was a “long-time member of” and gave “substantial sums” to charities including Dignity in Dying.
But perhaps most significantly, a contemporary Cadbury is sitting in parliament now – and backing Kim Leadbeater’s bill.
This is Ruth Cadbury – Labour MP for Brentford and Isleworth since 2015. She’s the granddaughter of one Paul Strangman Cadbury, yet another Eugenics Society fellow between its 1937 and 1977 membership lists.
Paul was the son of Barrow Cadbury, who took over the Cadbury’s business from his uncle George Cadbury Snr after his death in 1922. Barrow Cadbury’s wife Geraldine was another Eugenics Society member. He set up the Barrow Cadbury Trust, which Ruth was a trustee of until elected, and she chose to step down. Many of her close family members remain on the board.
The Canary approached both Ruth Cadbury MP and the Barrow Cadbury Trust for comment on this. Ruth did not respond to this specifically. The trust replied that:
With regards to Paul Cadbury and his mother’s membership of the Eugenics Society, the Trust has no previous knowledge of this, and knowing it has no bearing on our current work. We do know that Paul Cadbury and his wife were active campaigners to improve educational opportunities of children in the West Midlands with cerebral palsy. This included the setting up of Carson House school in the Harborne area of Birmingham in 1948, with Steve Quayle of Quayle Carpets in Kidderminster, as well as helping to set up the Midland Spastic Association in 1947, today known as Cerebral Palsy Midlands
Funding for public attitude research on voluntary euthanasia
As far as the Canary can find, the Barrow Cadbury Trust hasn’t given directly to either Dignity in Dying or its sister charity. Nor have we found evidence of it financing the work of the organisation under its former names. However, it did fund a 2020 to 2024 King’s College, London research series called the World Values Survey (WVS). This aimed to track:
the evolution of values, attitudes, beliefs and behaviour on topics that range from cultural identity, migration, interpersonal trust, empathy and human tolerance to media usage, political interest and views on science, technology and environmental protection.
Most significantly, one publication it put out included a survey that looked at different demographics’ views towards voluntary euthanasia across the UK.
Professor Bobby Duffy led the WVS work. He told the Canary that:
The Barrow Cadbury Trust did contribute financially to the World Values Survey (WVS), as one of eight funders, with the major funder being the Economic and Social Research Council. The WVS study has no connection to the September study. The WVS is one of the largest and longest-running social surveys in the world, covering around 290 questions across a very wide range of issues, on attitudes to immigration, government, work, parenting, trust and many more, with a number of questions going back to the 1980s. There is one single question on euthanasia, which has been asked since 1981, and the Barrow Cadbury Trust had no role in the questionnaire design or release of these results.
Meanwhile, the spokesperson from the Barrow Cadbury Trust had a similarly-worded response, stating that:
Barrow Cadbury Trust is proud to support the Policy Institute’s work on the global World Values Survey (WVS).
WVS is one of the largest and longest-running social surveys in the world, covering around 290 questions across a very wide range of issues. Assisted dying is not an issue we have worked on or are currently working on, nor do we have a position on the issue. We were not involved in any discussions about the question related to assisted dying in the World Values Survey, which is the same question that has been asked since its inception in the 1980s.
Polling the public
The same group at King’s also conducted a separate survey on assisted dying in September, alongside the King’s Complex Life and Death Decisions (CLADD) research group. Duffy is director to both – and led this more recent assisted dying survey as well. The groups put their findings out the same week Kim Leadbeater introduced her bill to the House of Commons.
Duffy did however confirm that the Barrow Cadbury Trust did not fund this piece of research. He told the Canary that:
The research conducted in September was paid for using internal funds. No other organisations contributed financially.
Crucially though, in both projects, headline results have revolved around the seeming broad public support for legalising assisted dying.
However, Duffy and his team at CLADD have tempered against taking these results at face value. Notably, they’ve previously pointed out that polling on this often obscures the complexities of public attitudes towards legalising it.
Nonetheless, the King’s press release – and resulting corporate media coverage – honed in on the purported two-thirds public support.
Ruth Cadbury MP: a prominent advocate of Leadbeater’s bill
However, it’s Ruth Cadbury’s outspoken support for assisted dying that’s most telling. She has previously spoken in multiple debates airing her pro-assisted dying views.
In April, Dignity in Dying hosted an event outside parliament where Ruth Cadbury promised that:
a future Labour government would make time for a private members’ bill and a free vote, so that Parliament can have the final say.
It’s therefore not out of the realms of possibility Ruth was a driving force behind Leadbeater’s introduction of the bill.
Then, in September, she schmoozed with Dignity in Dying representatives at Labour’s party conference fringe. So it’s perhaps unsurprising she has also publicly declared her backing of Leadbeater’s bill:
I am pleased that @kimleadbeater will be introducing much needed legislation to reform our laws around assisted dying.
Having heard harrowing testimony from families about the lack of dignity their loved ones faced it is clear we need to reform the law. https://t.co/M2UTxzI71g
— Ruth Cadbury (@RuthCadbury) October 9, 2024
Ruth also identifies as a Humanist and attended the group’s fringe at the 2024 September Labour Party Conference. There, she:
emphasised the importance of rallying around the upcoming Private Member’s Bill.
According to the Telegraph in October, at least 38 Labour MPs are pushing for Leadbeater’s bill to extend to people “incurably suffering”. Humanists UK was the Telegraph’s source for this, and the organisation is leading the charge on extending the scope of the bill.
The Canary therefore enquired with Ruth Cadbury whether she is among the 38 Labour MPs and supported the Humanist UK’s calls for a broader law. She confirmed that she is not one these MPs, stating to us that:
I do not support, and have never supported, extending the scope of Kim Leadbeater’s Bill.
Nevertheless, Ruth is still a key force in parliament pushing for the legalisation of assisted dying for terminally ill people. She’s now chair of the Dignity in Dying co-run All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Choice at the End of Life. Crucially, she appears to have taken on this role around the time Leadbeater confirmed she was planning to introduce the bill. The register – the most recent available – shows the APPG’s membership on 9 October. The previous register in August didn’t list the Choice at the End of Life APPG.
Failing to reckon with its eugenicist past…
None of this is to say that the GW Cadbury’s Charitable Trust trustees, Ruth Cadbury MP, or Dignity in Dying itself are motivated by eugenicist beliefs or goals today. The fact remains however that the organisation and its supporters haven’t acknowledged or remotely reckoned with this past.
The Canary put all this to Dignity in Dying/Compassion in Dying’s media communications team. A spokesperson for the organisations commented that:
Dignity in Dying is a modern campaigning organisation, focused on changing the law so that terminally ill, mentally competent adults can have the choice of an assisted death. We have over half a million supporters and polling consistently shows that 75% of people in Britain support the change we are campaigning for. We want dying people to have the choice of a safe, legal assisted death alongside excellent end-of-life care.
As set out in Compassion in Dying’s annual reports, the charity has received funding from the GW Cadbury Trust, which is a charitable trust regulated by the Charity Commission.
Dignity in Dying and its proponents might argue that its values have shifted with the times. Its roots were in eugenics, but now, its focus is on the alleviation of incurable human suffering for people with terminal diagnoses. Its slick rebrand from the Voluntary Euthanasia Society to Dignity in Dying is this in a nutshell. It equates its aims with the seemingly laudable, compassionate pursuit of a person’s agency over their own death, and the idea that this is a vital part of maintaining their dignity.
A burden
This is rife with issues anyway – not least that there’s a subtle implication of terminally ill people being a burden, and the fact it equates losing dignity with people becoming progressively more disabled. Essentially, this raises the spectre of society’s internalised ableism acting to subliminally coerce people to assisted suicide – which is obviously a big part of the problem.
The same goes for chronically ill and disabled people. While the bill currently doesn’t extend beyond people deemed terminal within six months, we’ve made the point before that in other countries – like Canada for instance – expansion has tended to follow.
And for all its progressive-sounding rhetoric, as the Canary previously revealed, the organisation and its sister charity are being financed by multi-millionaire corporate capitalists and mystery donors obscured behind tax haven-based offshore firms. Largely though, the lobby group itself is hush-hush about its big donors. Obviously, it begs the question of just who could be pushing the UK to legalise assisted suicide.
And the eugenicist present
And as it turns out, society hasn’t really moved on from eugenicist ideas as much as we’d like to believe either. Now, it simply takes on new, masked forms. Forms that conceal the racist, colonialist, and ableist cracks at the heart of today’s global capitalist economic set-up. You might even say it’s like a bar of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk chocolate. Over the years, the recipe may have changed, but all the same basic ingredients are still there – creating a new flavour of more palatable eugenist policy.
What is the state-sanctioned deaths of tens of thousands of disabled people under the UK’s punitive, repressive social security system, if not eugenics masquerading as economic conservatism? Hundreds of thousands of poor, marginalised people dying to austerity was another example of indirect eugenics through fiscal policy.
Think Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) notices on learning disabled people at the height of the Covid pandemic. Then there’s Boris Johnson’s so-called herd immunity “let it rip” policy. It disproportionately led to the deaths of chronically ill, disabled, poor, and racially minoritised people. This is all eugenics by any other name. And medical professionals, politicians, and sizeable portions of the public have condoned them with barely a second thought.
Capitalist profit motives for assisted dying
Moreover, when the capitalist profit motive and eugenics go so neatly hand in hand today, Dignity in Dying, and its backers dismissive attitude to the dangers of legalising assisted suicide is extremely problematic too.
In 2021, Canada passed its bill to legalise assisted death for disabled people with non-terminal illnesses. Since then, harrowing stories have emerged of chronically ill and disabled people turning to MAID due to poverty, homelessness, and a lack of quality healthcare.
Meanwhile, in Oregon and California in the US, insurance companies stopped funding potentially life-saving or life-extending treatments. Notably, this was after these states passed assisted suicide legislation. But, insurance providers told patients they would cover euthanasia drugs, naturally.
In these instances, the state and corporations are deciding whose lives are worth supporting, who is worth saving. And it reads right from the eugenics playbook. In short: not poor, chronically ill, disabled, racially minoritised people.
Leadbeater’s assisted dying bill: a danger to chronically ill and disabled people
So, however much Dignity in Dying have tried to bury its eugenicist past, it’s a chapter of the organisation’s history that holds ramifications for the upcoming parliamentary vote on assisted suicide. That remains the case whether it – and backers of the bill more broadly – choose to face up to these origins and lingering connections or not.
Because at the end of the day, all this begs the question: is legalising assisted suicide safe in a society where capitalist eugenicist undercurrents are still at play? Not for many groups the pro-assisted dying lobby has pushed to the margins in this debate. Unfortunately, across the world, there’s already ample enough proof of that.
Feature image via the Canary/ Youtube – Aaron Walderslade/ Wikimedia – Wellcome Library, image altered, licensed under CC BY 4.0
