What was claimed
Dominic Cummings said “Poor people are poor because they have inferior genes and brains. Rich people are rich because they are superior.”
Our verdict
There’s no record of him having written or having said this phrase.
Dominic Cummings did not say this phrase about genetics and poor people
5 September 2019
We’ve seen a post on Facebook and on Twitter claiming that the Prime Minister’s chief adviser Dominic Cummings said: “Poor people are poor because they have inferior genes and brains. Rich people are rich because they are superior.”
The graphic says its source is one of Mr Cummings’ essays, entitled ‘Some thoughts on Education and Political priorities’, which he published while he was an adviser to then-Education Secretary Michael Gove.
The words in the viral post are not a quote from that 237 page essay. The phrase doesn’t appear anywhere on his blog either.
Part of the essay, which was published in 2013, discusses genetics and social mobility, which was picked up by the Guardian at the time, and mentioned in a Guardian opinion piece by Polly Toynbee. She quoted part of the essay in her article, which said: “Most of those who now dominate discussions of issues such as ‘social mobility’ entirely ignore genetics and therefore their arguments are at best misleading and often worthless.”
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false as there’s no record of him having written or said it.