No Noose Is Good News

Lee Anderson likes to suggest that his two previous parties left him, but there is no way that he was in favour of capital punishment in 2018 as a 51-year-old Labour councillor on the staff of a Labour MP. Even if the death penalty were available, then it would never be permitted for anyone who had pleaded guilty to something that he had done when he was 17. As with a whole life order, the line has to be somewhere.

The restoration of capital punishment would effectively decriminalise murder. Even if the legislation provided for it, then no judge could conceivably accept a majority verdict in a capital trial. In the Britain of the twenty-first century, there would always be at least one of 12 randomly assembled members of the general public who would vote to acquit anyone rather than risk the imposition of the death penalty. In fact, there would always be at least two or three. Those who wanted to bring back what they saw as higher qualifications for jurors would, if anything, increase that number.

If there were never any realistic possibility of a conviction for murder, then no one would ever be charged with it. Instead, ways would be found of convicting murderers of manslaughter, resentment of the injustice of which we saw in Nottingham this time last year. So convicted, they would almost certainly be released earlier than if their records were of intentional homicide. Britain would become a very much more dangerous place.

In any case, who among the kind of people who became judges in today's Britain would ever impose the death penalty? Who among the kind of people who became prosecutors in today's Britain would ever seek its imposition, or chance that by bringing a charge of murder? Even if there were a high likelihood of conviction. Indeed, especially so, on principle. Elect them, you say? Well, Members of Parliament are elected, and they rejected capital punishment by 403 votes to 159 the last time that the House of Commons divided on it at all. Under a Conservative Government. 31 years ago.

The remaining proponents of the death penalty would support it only for certain classes of murder. Yet that whole concept was used in 1969 as the definitive argument for making permanent its 1965 suspension. 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.

People 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. That made them, well, how does one put this nicely? One cannot. At some level, life was 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. The argument being made today that it would be cheaper to execute Axel Rudakubana is Kit Malthouse's argument for assisted suicide.

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 they know 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. Who among them would not be branded a "misfit" or a "loner" by Keir Starmer?

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 still the liberal supporters of military interventionism, and now also of assisted suicide.