In the United Kingdom, prominent people from different political parties and backgrounds in arts and science supported eugenic ideas and aimed to have them made into law.
[2][3] Desmond King and Randall Hansen have noted that the effort to promote eugenicist ideas was driven by a privileged minority rather than electoral support.
[1][4] The Eugenics Society praised the Report and the Minister for Health, Sir Hilton Young, sought support for a motion on sterilisation.
[4] Herbert Ritchie Spencer, Charles Oliver Hawthorne and Philip Hamill opposed the Report, though the other 82 Fellows of the Royal College of Physicians who voted on it, including Walter Langdon-Brown, supported mass sterilisation as proposed.
[10] But the Report did not win over doubters[7] and Young refused to push the issue forward, concerned that there was a lack of voter support.
[4] The Nazi eugenic practices praised by the Report but then widely condemned during and after World War II made it impossible for the proposals to get support.
[4][15] Historians Greta Jones and John MacNicol have argued that the Brock Report is evidence that there were limits to connections between 'progressive' thought and eugenics because the Labour Party blocked sterilisation measures they saw as anti-working class.
He notes that religion of constituents, as much as class issues, may have led to its rejection, and that doctors and women who were Labour members and sought more access to birth control were in favour of the report.