Enough Rope

Lee Anderson's volunteering to be a hangman does appear to have been a one day wonder, and while he was only ever appointed in order to make a show of sacking him, he had probably not been expected to say anything quite that bad, quite that soon.

While in 10 years' time, today's 40 per cent support for capital punishment will be down to the 15 to 20 per cent that will always be incorrigible on the subject, for now it does enjoy a residual following among the less educated section of the very old. But even then they would support it only for certain classes of murder. Yet that whole concept was used in 1969 as the definitive argument for making permanent the 1965 suspension of the death penalty.

The alternative, it was argued, would have been a reversion to the 1957 Homicide Act, with its intolerable obscenity of, yes, different classes of murder, some of which were capital offences while others were not.  Thus was it declared better, or at least not as bad, to murder one person rather than another. Between 1957 and 1965, there were two executions per year, a kind of symbolic blood sacrifice return to which would have been, and would be, grotesque. That was the knockdown argument for getting rid of the whole thing forever, and it still is.

That, and the suggestion from Willie Ross, Harold Wilson's only ever Secretary of State for Scotland, that if execution were to be retained, then it ought to be carried out on television. That unanswerable line shocked a number of waverers into the Aye Lobby. Ross, who was also a staunch opponent both of devolution and of EEC membership, was no liberal, having tried to ban ITV from carrying advertisements on Sundays, Christmas Day and Good Friday.

Nor was the Home Secretary in 1969 Roy Jenkins, but Jim Callaghan, who had previously been Parliamentary Adviser to the Police Federation. Callaghan pointed out that there had been no increase in the murder rate since the suspension. If the figures for violent crime are much higher today, then that is because all sorts of extreme violence is no longer tolerated, or at least not as much as it was. In the days that half or more of the remaining supporters of the death penalty were coming of age, then those acts might officially have been illegal, although even that was not always the case, but they were treated in most or all ways as if they were perfectly within the law.

Some people who were formed by the brutality of daily school violence (including corporal punishment, which was so ubiquitous that it was obviously a complete failure in its own terms), of socially respectable domestic violence, of regular fights at work, of routine fights of what would now be a very uncommon ferocity in and around pubs, of National Service, and so on, all against the ever-present societal memory of the War and of mass pre-War deaths from poverty-related illnesses or from the lack of workers' protection, well, how does one put this nicely? One cannot. At some level, life is just cheaper to them.

"Centrist" opponents of the death penalty nevertheless have their wars, their self-indulgent refusal to enforce the drug laws, their Police brutality and other street violence, their numerous life-shortening consequences of economic inequality, their abortions, at least putatively their euthanasia, and so on. They must answer for themselves on those points, as must opponents of those things who would support capital punishment, although in my 30-year experience in the pro-life movement that oft-alleged position is practically unheard of. We have no case to answer to either of those charges.

Enoch Powell always did oppose the death penalty, and I have found that, perhaps in reaction to neoconservative bloodthirstiness, American paleoconservatives are at least as likely to oppose it as to support it. Traditional conservatives may be, with Muslims, the people most likely to think that there were an argument in favour of the principle, but they would also be two of the three groups most likely to be on the receiving end if it were ever brought back. The Old Right may talk about safeguards of this, that or the other variety, but it knows that if those had been possible, then there would never have been abolition. They themselves would not have been executed in those days, but that just made them privileged, and they are more and more conscious of being from the other side of the tracks these days.

The third category of likely victims of restored capital punishment would be the Left, a section of which, on this as on the nuclear weapons to which Powell was also implacably opposed, used to be open to the charge of hypocrisy on this matter, since it did not seem to mind either of them in countries of which it approved. Still, that was only ever a section of the Left, even if it was quite a large section at one time, and on both points it would be vanishingly small now. There are some Muslims against whom the claim could be made, but the screaming hypocrites about the death penalty are now, as they always have been, liberal supporters of the United States.

Although for how much longer? The biggest threat of a return to the gallows in two generations is the prospect of Keir Starmer as Prime Minister, with or without the monstrous Yvette Cooper as Home Secretary. But we are heading for a hung Parliament. To strengthen families and communities by securing economic equality and international peace through the democratic political control of the means to those ends, including national and parliamentary sovereignty, we need to hold the balance of power. Owing nothing to either main party, we must be open to the better offer. There does, however, need to be a better offer. Not a lesser evil, which in any case the Labour Party is not.