Andrew Sabisky: Boris Johnson's ex-adviser in his own words
Andrew Sabisky, who resigned as a No 10 adviser on Monday night, had been criticised for a series of controversial opinions he had expressed publicly.
He claimed in 2014 in a blogpost that there was a racial difference in intelligence:
There are excellent reasons to think the very real racial differences in intelligence are significantly – even mostly – genetic in origin, though the degree is of course a very serious subject of scholarly debate.
That debate busily bustles on, and I’m sure we’ll have more precise answers in another 5 years or so, though whether the politicians will pay any attention is debatable.
It would be nice if they did from the standpoint of immigration control (in the UK, that is).
He suggested in a 2014 blogpost reply that black Americans are on average less intelligent than white Americans:
If the mean black American IQ is (best estimate based on a century’s worth of data) around 85, as compared to a mean white American IQ of 100, then if IQ is normally distributed (which it is), you will see a far greater percentage of blacks than whites in the range of IQs 75 or below, at which point we are close to the typical boundary for mild mental retardation. Typically criminals with IQs below 70 cannot be executed in the USA, I believe.
That parsimoniously explains the greater diagnostic rates for blacks when it comes to ‘Intellectual disability’.
Sabisky suggested introducing compulsory contraception under a blogpost by Dominic Cummings in 2014:
One way to get around the problems of unplanned pregnancies creating a permanent underclass would be to legally enforce universal uptake of long-term contraception at the onset of puberty. Vaccination laws give it a precedent, I would argue.
He proposed allocation of government money based on IQ tests for all 11-year-olds under a blogpost by Dominic Cummings in 2015:
Why not just give everyone an IQ test at 11 and give secondary schools pupil premium money based on the number of below-average-ability students they get – the correlation between IQ [at] 11 and GCSE score 5 years later is a hefty .8!”
In a review of the book The Welfare Trait by Dr Adam Perkins in 2016 he suggested that benefits claimants could be discouraged from having lots of children:
A large body of evidence, which Perkins reviews, supports the intuitive idea that habitual welfare claimants tend to be less conscientious and agreeable than the average person.
Such habitual claimants also tend to reproduce at higher rates than the general population, a pattern found across nations and time periods … With praiseworthy boldness, Perkins gets off the fence and recommends concrete policy solutions for the problems that he identifies, arguing that governments should try to adjust the generosity of welfare payments to the point where habitual claimants do not have greater fertility than those customarily employed … The explicit targeting of fertility as a goal of welfare policy, however, goes beyond current government policy.
Perkins perhaps should also have argued for measures to boost the fertility of those with pro-social personalities, such as deregulation of the childcare and housing markets to cut the costs of sustainable family formation.”
On the Good Judgment Project website in 2016 he argued that Turkey joining the EU should be a non-starter over its “troublesome” migrants:
The EU already has enough of a problem with migration – the entire population of Turkey being granted freedom to move to any European nation is absolutely unthinkable. Giving Turkey EU membership would be a bit like drinking a bottle of bleach in an effort to cure your appendicitis.”
In Schools Week 2016 he argued that drugs for narcolepsy could be used to improve brain function, even though there are health risks:
From a societal perspective the benefits of giving everyone modafinil once a week are probably worth a dead kid once a year.”
Sabisky questioned in a book review in 2014 of Tatu Vanhanen’s Ethnic Conflicts whether a growing Muslim population could be met with violent resistance, using a discredited statistic:
Will institutionalized power-sharing (as in Northern Ireland) become the norm in the West – not between Catholic and Protestant, but between Muslim and non-Muslim (by around 2050 Britain is forecast to be a majority Islamic nation on current birthrate trends)? How much internal resistance will there be to the adaptation of current institutions? How much of the resistance, and counter-resistance, will be violent?”
