I am sincerely at a loss as to the source of the utterly ridiculous notion that Parliament is there to give voice to any and every opinion that might happen to be held in the population at large, and to give effect to any that might at least appear to have majority support.
As the parliamentarians who abolished the death penalty understood implicitly, the point of voting for a parliamentary candidate is precisely to choose a person whom one believes to be better equipped in this regard than oneself and than the general public. If any MP is not like that, then the solution is to replace him or her with a new MP who is.
Far fewer countries have the death penalty than is generally supposed, and far more American States never use it, or do not even have it these days. It hardly happens in the US outside Texas. I defy those of you who support it to explain why you agree with a practice now most prevalent in China, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, North Korea and Cuba. Are those states of which you approve?
But the real point is this: the State has no more right to take a morally innocent human life (i.e., that of a wrongly convicted person) on the basis of mere judicial guilt than on the basis of, say, disability, or old age, or terminal illness, or still being in the womb.
So, when can we expect liberal America and the UN, which recently called for a moratorium on the death penalty by a margin far too large to be put down to mere Western cultural imperialism, to act against those evils, too?
Nor is it coherent for a country to have nuclear weapons (which likewise have absolutely no deterrent value, but that is not quite the present point) but not capital punishment. The solution to that incoherence is not the restoration or retention of capital punishment.
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Only you would dare say these things, David. That's why you should be in one House of Praliament or the other, and that's why you are not.
ReplyDeleteI thought you viewed your movement as the true voice of the people though? Attlee and Bevin backed the death penalty. It seems that in this case you are out of touch with your Old Labour heroes and those you claim to represent?
ReplyDeleteYour views on nuclear weapons are ridiculous. War is about destroying your enemy's ability to resist. This is achieved by convincing him that his army can't defend him, by destroying his industry and by sapping his morale. Parts two and three require the deliberate targeting of civilians. All long range weapons are specifically designed to do that. There is no moral difference betweeen nuclear and non-nuclear, only a difference in the time taken to achieve the same ends. As for deterrence, the Group of Soviet Forces Germany had sufficient conventional forces to invade West Germany and probably France, throughout the Cold War. It didn't out of fear of a nuclear strike that could, in minutes, have killed as many as World War 2. Soviet plans envisaged an existential threat to Germany (East and West) but not France or the UK, though West Germany had greater conventional forces. As stated in those plans, West Germany could not respond with a nuclear attack on Russian civilians, while the other two could. You will never understand nuclear weapons until you understand that there is no front line and that all countries worry about civilian casualties. And forget the idea that nuclear weapons don't prevent terrrorism or small-scale wars like The Falklands. They aren't designed to. They did, of course, allow us to deploy almost our entire navy thousands of mile away without fear of invasion of our homeland by an enemy with conventional forces able to do so in those circumstances.
ReplyDeleteThe answers to both of those points are in one of the books, which I have just had back from the proof-reader. I am going tp have to publish the other one independently, since no one is buying theology at the moment, but I maintain that it will still be bought by as many people as would ever have bought it. So watch this space.
ReplyDeleteRead the extract on the Catholic Theological Association list, knew you would not find anyone in the current economic cliché. Looking forward to it, though. As you doubtless know, you have annoyed all the right people with it even before it has been published. But you are the rising generation and they are somewhat less so. Including within the CTA, membership of which, your online critics who claim that you are not an academic should note, is by election only.
ReplyDeleteYou've got into the CTA? Bloody hell!
ReplyDeleteI've been in it for years. I am at Durham, you know, darling. None of your rubbish. But let's stay on topic, shall we?
ReplyDeleteI always used to love the CTA's publicity, they probably still do it, about how "flexible" they could be with entry requirements. Try getting in and see exactly how flexible they really are. How many times did you apply?
ReplyDeleteWhat an extraordinary question. Just the once, of course.
ReplyDeleteBut I mean it: on topic, please.
You should have published the other one yourself, too. It would have been out a year ago. Or are you trying to get at least one of their existing authors to cut all ties because they have published you? That is what rumour has it in the literary and political London that you pretend to take no interest in.
ReplyDeleteIf that is who I think it is, he would not be published for the first time now, so it is not as if he would be any loss. How times change, and how quickly.
ReplyDeleteWhat a history you have of making enemies among those who demand deference to a bad PhD.
Any chance of your book mentioning that one of the most coherent critics of capital punishment and nuclear weapons alike was one J. Enoch Powell?
ReplyDeleteOh, depend on it.
ReplyDeleteIt'll not be reviewed, you know. Even Peter Hitchens could only get his last one reviewed in his own newspaper. The limits on permissible opinion are now horrendous.
ReplyDeleteWhat are the names of the upcoming books?
ReplyDeleteIT permitting (don't get me started), you will know that by the end of the week.
ReplyDelete