ANGELA Rayner is an inspiration to stupid people everywhere. The former Housing Secretary is a front-runner to oust Sir Keir Starmer and become Britain’s next Prime Minister, despite behaviour that frequently borders on the imbecilic.
On a trip to Paris to watch a Six Nations rugby match this month with her boyfriend, the far left ex-MP Sam Tarry, she became embroiled in high jinks in a bar that ended with another former MP tied to a chair. She then phoned a Tory peer, Nicholas Soames, to harangue him about a lost teddy bear, much to his amusement and bemusement.
This is far from the first time Ms Rayner’s antics have seen her in the headlines. Last summer she was pictured knocking back wine from a balloon glass on Hove seafront, and vaping as she lounged in an inflatable dinghy on the water.
Many will be baffled that a woman so manifestly ignorant and charmless could be tipped to lead Labour – once the party of serious intellectual heavyweights such as Clement Attlee, Nye Bevan, Michael Foot and Roy Jenkins. But it is no surprise to anyone who has studied, as I have, the general decline of intelligence in the British population over the past hundred years, and especially the IQ nosedive on the left.
Put simply, left-wingers are becoming stupid much faster than right-wingers. This is most apparent in Westminster, but it’s generally true across the country. You could call it the Raynerisation of Britain.
Since the beginning of this century, people on the progressive left have become more obtuse, vacuous and shallow, at a faster rate than those who are naturally conservative. According to my research correlating intelligence to political views based on a US study of some 6,000 people when you control for socioeconomic factors, such as education and income, conservatives are about 2 IQ points more intelligent than liberals.
None of us has reason for complacency about this. Data from multiple sources, discussed in my book Woke Eugenics: How Social Justice is a Mask for Social Darwinism, show the whole native population, in Britain as well as the States, is dumbing down. That trend has been evident for a century-and-a-half, since the high point of human IQ in the 1870s.
The phenomenon is accelerating. My study of the cohort of the US population with the highest intelligence in the year 2000 reveal 6 per cent were liberals, while it is now 4 per cent and falling. Conversely, 4 per cent were deeply conservative in 2000, and that figure is now 4.5 per cent and rising.
Statistically, extreme liberals are getting stupider 2.5 times more quickly than extreme conservatives. They are also more prone to mental health problems.
Evidence of burgeoning stupidity is drawn from much more than IQ tests alone. It’s literally in front of our very eyes, as I explore in my book At Our Wits’ End: Why We’re Becoming Less Intelligent and What It Means for the Future.
Facial symmetry is one proven correlate of intelligence. Clever people tend to have symmetrical faces: that’s one reason why we have evolved to perceive asymmetrical, crooked faces as ugly.
Height is another correlate of intelligence. Take a look at groups of politicians and you’ll tend to notice that right-wingers are the taller, better-looking ones.
Though this is true now, it wasn’t always the case. Pundits in 1960 attributed Democrat John F Kennedy’s unexpected victory over Richard Nixon in the presidential elections to his more attractive appearance during televised debates: JFK was taller and more handsome than Tricky Dicky, who sweated profusely.
Several generations later, the liberals have lost this advantage. They are, on average, physically shorter, with weaker grip strength and less symmetrical hands. By objective measures, they are uglier. And they are less likely to survive serious illnesses.
It’s no coincidence that this change has occurred with increasing rapidity since the sexual revolution of the 1960s, and the introduction of reliable contraception. Intelligent people have been breeding more selectively. Stupid people have been breeding more uncontrollably. And left-wing politics, with its unsustainable promises of more money for less work, appeals to the stupid.
Controversial though this assertion may seem, it is an inescapable conclusion drawn from the General Social Survey (GSS), a sociological survey run by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. Since 1972, it has been conducting in-depth interviews with thousands of people across society’s spectrum to assemble a mass of information about how they live and think.
The GSS confirms a fact that has been evident since the end of the 19th century: that humans in the West are becoming less articulate and losing their cognitive acuity, at a rate of about 1.5 IQ points per decade.
Over 125 years that’s a significant reduction, one that is readily apparent if we compare the literature, music, journalism and art of the 1900s to today’s work. The difference in eloquence between a 1926 speech by Liberal party leader David Lloyd George, for example, and one by Keir Starmer or Angela Rayner in 2026, is stark and shocking.
Left-wing academics disparage IQ tests because the data reveal so many uncomfortable truths. They claim the tests are unreliable, because they partly reflect standards of education, and not everyone has the same access to good schools.
But about 80 per cent of IQ is inherited. It’s genetic, not learnt. And it is the genetic element of Intelligence Quotient that is on the wane. Reaction times, a robust intelligence correlate, are getting longer. Backward digit span, which is the ability to recall numbers and say them backwards, is getting worse. Creativity is ebbing.
General levels of intelligence have subsided so far that we are now roughly on a level with the population of 1600, in the Elizabethan era.
One main driver for that slump is the efficiency of contraception. Thanks to huge improvements in child healthcare, the UK mortality rate in under-fives has tumbled from about 15 per cent 1900 to less than 4 per cent now, according to the World Health Organization.
That means people don’t need to have large families to ensure their heirs grow up to adulthood. And the Pill (along with the legalisation of abortion) means women can, if they choose, manage their own fertility.
Not all women do choose to do so. Unwanted pregnancies remain common among people who have not got the sense to avoid them. Inevitably, they tend to be the ones reliant on state welfare, and the ones who have failed in education – to put it bluntly, the less intelligent ones.
If people with low IQs are having disproportionately more babies, you might expect the number of unintelligent children to increase. And you’d be right. Studies of human DNA over the past ten years have isolated alleles, or genes, that are directly linked to inherited intelligence. Brain-power, like everything else, is passed down through the generations.
It’s a grim prospect. But there’s one glimmer of hope. A new trend is spreading on the woke left among people who proclaim that capitalism and climate change are so awful that it’s immoral to bring children into the world.
Perhaps, if they all stop having babies, we can redress the balance and start getting a bit smarter. This is precisely what’s happening. When you control for intelligence – for example, in the GSS – the big predictor of fertility is conservatism and traditional religiosity and these seem to be somewhere in the region of 60 per cent genetic, based on twin studies.
Clearly, these data would predict exactly what we see: the Rayner Effect; intelligence decline among natives being more pronounced on the left. Hence, among Generation Z – putting aside the sociological reasons why a portion of them would naturally rebel against the woke culture in which they’ve been brought up – genetics alone should predict a gradual shift towards conservatism in society as the more intelligent become more conservative.
In a sense, wokeness is a selection, at least among the more intelligent, though the Woke are likely to do enormous damage, and heavily reduce living standards, before finally breeding themselves out. Those who, for genetic reasons, are not drawn into it will be those whose descendants populate the future. Whether these people will govern Britain it its current form is another question. The country is likely to Balkanize along racial lines, and there is some evidence that this is already happening, with heavily white areas actually becoming whiter.
