Saturday 27 July 2019

Not Heaping Up Their Own Funeral Pyre

My dear friends, the American paleoconservatives, are in high dudgeon at the return of the federal death penalty. 

There is a reason why Enoch Powell was so strongly opposed to capital punishment, although of course it is academic in Britain even under the inevitably short-lived Home Secretaryship of Priti Patel. 

Trial by jury is all well and good, but a jury never can and never should decide, either whether or not a particular charge was to be brought, or what the sentence should be once a conviction had been arrived at.

In my ongoing experience of the Crown Prosecution Service, traditional conservatives would be, as Powell might have put it, "mad, literally mad" to have any confidence whatever in it. They tend to like the Police in practice a lot less than I do, too.

My experience of judges has been limited to one who has been, I have to say, scrupulously fair and courteous to me while telling the other side exactly what he thought of its failure to do the paperwork and so forth. 

But no traditional conservative could doubt, when faced with the wildly differential sentencing in this country on class, ethnic and political grounds, that he would be vastly more likely to hang for the same offence than a liberal would be.

Not only, although certainly, because he would be vastly more likely than a liberal would be to have been charged with the offence in the first place.

Neither the charge nor the sentence would be any concern of a jury. And capital crimes would be far more likely than crimes in general to have a political dimension at all.

Therefore, it is no wonder that my dear friends, the American paleoconservatives, are in high dudgeon at the return of the federal death penalty. 

And although of course it is academic in Britain even under the inevitably short-lived Home Secretaryship of Priti Patel, there is a reason why Enoch Powell was so strongly opposed to capital punishment.

Ostensibly Old Right figures who are keener on this practice may have larger popular followings, but they are to some extent outside the loop by being inside the Establishment. They do not quite comprehend their own dissident status.

4 comments:

  1. The most ethnically diverse Cabinet in history, with the son of a poor Pakistani bus driver as Chancellor. What a cause for celebration! Yet the Left is in uproar because these are the “wrong sort” of ethnic minorities, including (shock, horror!) a Home Secretary who actually believes in punishing criminals. How outrageous. The Crown Prosecution Service, like “majority” jury verdicts, an armed police and the abolition of the protection against double jeopardy, was only created after the abolition of the death penalty.

    It’s one of many ways abolishing the death penalty weakened our civil liberties (including the subsequent arming of the police).

    The return of the death penalty would be an excellent reason to undo all those disastrous reforms.

    It can only be brought back by returning to the system in the United States, of unanimous jury verdicts, no Crown

    There is no evidence of any discrimination in sentencing on the basis of class, race or political preferences; our justice system is equally pathetically soft on criminals of all classes and races.

    Priti Patel ought to bring back the principle of proper punishment.

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    1. I stopped reading after the silly first sentence. We are not neoliberals here, so no, we don't care what colour (or sex) a politician is.

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    2. They've always had both armed police and capital punishment in America, you clown. They probably have armed police in every country with the death penalty, they are just violent countries all round.

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    3. Well said. Both of those points need to be made forcefully. The Americans have always had both armed police and capital punishment, while every country with the death penalty also has armed police, because it is just a violent country generally.

      Traditional conservatives who still support capital punishment have not quite comprehended that they are dissidents. With, say, a Fleet Street column, who would? But capital charges would be vastly more likely to be in some sense political than crimes in general would be, traditional conservatives would be vastly more likely to be charged than liberals would be, and traditional conservatives would be vastly more likely to be sentenced to death upon conviction than liberals would be. Those who still do not quite grasp that are, to that extent, still just playing at the Counterrevolution.

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