Keynes took Alf Garnett view on race

John Maynard Keynes, one of the greatest economists, believed that the working classes bred too much and saw deaths from famine, war and pestilence as the most effective means of raising living standards in over-populated Third World countries.

According to an unpublished manuscript in the archives of King's College, Cambridge, Lord Keynes was an active campaigner during the 1920s for birth control as a solution to these problems. With attitudes that would have done Alf Garnett proud, he also advocated strict immigration controls against peoples from poor countries to guard Europe against the consequences of their over-population.

These views, revealed by Professor John Toye of the Institute of Development Studies in the latest issue of the Cambridge Journal of Economics, were reflected in Keynes's public activities during the 1920s. He was a member of the Eugenics Society, although Professor Toye notes that he was "temperamentally and philosophically opposed to their championship of a fecund middle class, believing that family life militated against both intellectual creativity and participation in public affairs".

Keynes also belonged to two birth control organisations, the Malthusian League and Marie Stopes's Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress. He was a vice-president of the latter and spoke at many conferences on the subject.

His views on over-breeding shed an unflattering light on the hero of the left-wing of the economics profession. It is Keynesian economics that underpin the notion that governments can help reduce unemployment and redistribute incomes from rich to poor.

The manuscript languishing in King's College suggests that Keynes, who became extremely wealthy, had little natural sympathy for the poor. Written in 1914, when globalisation of trade and investment seemed to have made living standards in Europe precarious, it painted over-population by the wrong sorts of people as the key problem.

"This is not the sort of thing that is normally said over dinner tables in Cambridge," Professor Toye said yesterday. Nor in Oxford: participants at an Oxford seminar on the paper in May 1914 rounded on Keynes for his condescension to the working class.

By 1930, however, Keynes described pessimism about over-population as "wildly mistaken" - without ever admitting that he had been one of the pessimists. Not only had war and influenza cut a swathe through the European population, but he also came to see technical progress as a means by which living standards could rise even when the population was growing rapidly. It perhaps explains one of his most famous remarks: "When I see that I am wrong, I change my mind. What do you do?"