Almost 80 years ago, in 1948, two of the greatest figures of the British Left, Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin, voted in the House of Commons to retain the death penalty, briefly suspended in a major parliamentary wrangle. Several other Labour ministers joined them, mostly working-class MPs. The event, though beyond doubt, is shocking to record. The Left has for years now viewed the execution of heinous murderers as wicked and futile, and has treated those who support it as knuckle-brushing barbarians unfit for civilised society. Yet like many fashionable positions, the Leftist dismissal of the death penalty is inconsistent, hypocritical, irrational and poorly supported by facts. The unmodish position is stronger and better reasoned.
Hanging people by the neck until dead, or whatever method you use, is a genuinely interesting subject and raises more profound issues than most of the controversies of our time. Yet it is usually embraced or dismissed amid a blaze of rage. Your view of it defines you, though not necessarily in the way you hope. My reluctant sympathy for the ultimate deterrent, forced on me by experience, facts and reason, has made me personally unacceptable in civilised society for decades. That has given me plenty of extra time to read, or admire the sunset, when I might otherwise have been eating agreeable soufflés and quaffing fine clarets with the liberal elite.
It is a topic of extraordinary power, but you will not win the debate by being right. I once checkmated the then Director General of the BBC, Mark Thompson, in an argument about broadcasting impartiality. I said that the BBC did not employ a single journalist who could have given a hostile interview to the noted anti-death-penalty campaigner Clive Stafford-Smith. He could not contradict me, and I can think of no better illustration of the Corporation’s profound, unalterable bias. This itself is evidence of the unreasoning nature of the abolitionist position. If it were just a debate, then the BBC would hire people on both sides of it. But my logical, factual victory made no difference at all, either to Mr Thompson or the BBC. They continued to think that I was a cruel, unjust yahoo and that Mr Stafford-Smith (who is indeed a lovely man) is a noble humanitarian.
On the other hand, I probably have more supporters among the non-BBC classes — though they are not all that much use to me. They are as emotional and irrational as the BBC liberals. Many of these are the young, assumed for so long to be hopelessly soppy. They are uninterested in old-fashioned Christian thought, and have become practical and tough. A recent opinion poll by More in Common showed that support for capital punishment is now stronger among 25 to 34-year-olds than among 65 to 74-year-olds, and more common among supposedly liberal women than among men. But are these people actually my allies? One in three of them also want the police to be armed, something I view with horror. They do not want the sort of England that I do. They just want eyes for eyes and teeth for teeth. They have entirely missed the point. Properly-conducted capital punishment makes a country less vengeful and more gentle.
I can just remember this country when it was an actual matter of national pride that our police were unarmed, in contrast with both the French and the Americans, the only countries which seriously sought to challenge us as “top nation”. I can also remember it as a place of gentleness and safety which would astonish the modern young. There is little doubt in my mind that it was the threat of the noose that allowed our police to remain weaponless for so long. Parliament has never actually decided to give the police guns. It lacks the nerve to take responsibility for such decisions. Instead, ministers, civil servants and police chiefs have quietly created a semi-armed constabulary, and if tasers had not been invented, I suspect most officers would now carry pistols. This has quite predictably created a new informal death penalty — but one without charge, trial, appeal or the possibility of reprieve, carried out by frightened men and women in a microsecond of fear and doubt.
Probably the single worst instance of this was the 2005 shooting of the totally innocent Brazilian electrician Jean Charles de Menezes, now painfully dramatised in the TV series Suspect. To this day, the British state has totally avoided taking responsibility for this horror. It was exactly that responsibility MPs were trying to escape when they abolished a proper lawful death penalty, by sneakily voting for a purportedly Private Member’s Bill to abolish hanging. The Bill in fact received vital support from Harold Wilson’s government whips. But the pretence meant that it was never put before the voters, either before or since.
The state’s view of the death penalty shows more clearly than almost any other policy what kind of civilisation we live in. By the way, I am not here discussing the death penalty in the United States, an empire haunted by its history of slavery and violence, where capital punishment is mainly a political fiction, espoused by candidates in the hope of appearing effective and resolute in the face of crime and disorder. Yes, people are occasionally executed there. I have seen this happen, twice, and it is a profound and disturbing experience.
But in both cases, the crime was many years in the past, and the killer might well, in slightly different circumstances, have lived on for many years. I can’t see how these events, so totally separated from the murders that led to them, could be expected to deter anything. Texas, one of the few states which genuinely applies the death penalty, suffered 1,322 homicides in 2018. It executed 13 killers that year, mostly years after their crimes. Other US states which formally have the penalty on their books seldom or never impose it. Your chances of actually being put to death for a horrible murder in the USA are only slightly higher than your chances of being carried off to another galaxy by aliens in the middle of the night. Most of those executed in the USA have been waiting to die for so long that they have forgotten what they did.
No, I am interested in Britain before the mid-Fifties, when the death penalty was eviscerated by Parliament.
It carried on half-heartedly for another few years, but Britain’s governing class had lost the will to punish, and by the time hanging was actually abolished, in 1965, it was an ineffectual remnant. People think they know that murder hasn’t really increased all that much since abolition 60 years ago. They are wrong. The number of homicides went up from around 300 per year in the early Sixties to around 700 a year in the first years of the 21st century. But it isn’t quite that simple, and in any case it was never just murder that the noose was supposed to deter. It was certain types of murder, generally the murder of strangers by thieves or rapists seeking to ensure there were no witnesses to their crimes, and certain actions, especially the carrying of firearms or knives, which might lead to murder. There are several different ways of classifying homicide, and the courts have shown a growing willingness to accept guilty pleas for manslaughter rather than to go through a long and expensive trial on a full murder charge.
There will always be murder, though it will sometimes be called by other names. In the modern era of hanging, we had remarkably few executions, an average of 13 a year from 1900 to 1964. We also had few homicides, an unarmed police force and very little armed crime or knife violence. No longer. Importantly, it is not necessarily murder which the death penalty prevents. Some murders are so utterly irrational that no deterrent could affect them. But the extent of the increase in violence has been concealed by the huge improvement in trauma treatment in our hospitals. Thanks to greater skills, better equipment and techniques, hundreds each year who would have died, especially of stab wounds, now survive.
One survey of the crimes of attempted murder and wounding to endanger life concluded that Britain’s murder rate would be at least treble what it is now but for improvements in medicine and the growing skills of surgeons and paramedics. This was some years ago, but is still in my view valid — almost all crime statistics in this country are now dubious and affected by various and ever-changing political targets, and by the increasing unwillingness of the police and courts to get involved in crime if they can possibly help it. Many people who are now charged with attempted murder or wounding would, within living memory, have been facing capital murder charges, as their victims’ lives would not have been saved. So if we still had the NHS of 1955, I suspect we would have a homicide rate comparable to that in the US.
“If we still had the NHS of 1955, I suspect we would have a homicide rate comparable to that in the US.”
The firearms control expert Colin Greenwood has noted another interesting fact. In 1948, and in 1955-57, hangings were suspended because Parliament was debating the abolition of the rope. Greenwood found a leap in armed and violent offences in 1948, followed by a return to previous levels when the suspension ended. The 1957 suspension (which ended with a much more restricted death penalty) was followed by a similar leap, a much smaller fall when the law came back into force, and a generally higher level of such crimes thereafter. There was then a sharp increase after abolition in the mid-Sixties, which has not abated since.
All of this is utilitarian, and there is nothing wrong with that as far as it goes. Utilitarians really have to support capital punishment, unless they close their minds to the facts. Many modern liberals will be shocked to discover that a man they much admire, John Stuart Mill, made a forceful speech, in April 1868, in favour of the death penalty for aggravated murder (what I should call heinous murder). Part of his reasoning was the appalling cruelty of long imprisonment, the only realistic alternative. I particularly share his horror of the living death of life imprisonment, still offered by reformers as a “humane” choice. As he put it: “I defend this penalty, when confined to atrocious cases, on the very ground on which it is commonly attacked — on that of humanity to the criminal; as beyond comparison the least cruel mode in which it is possible adequately to deter from the crime.”
There is a deeper reasoning which Mill would not have troubled with. But, as a Christian believer, I have to. And it is neatly wrapped in the 37th of the Church of England’s 39 Articles, “Of the Civil Magistrates”. It notes that “The Laws of the Realm may punish Christian men with death, for heinous and grievous offences”, adding “It is lawful for Christian men, at the commandment of the Magistrate, to wear weapons, and serve in the wars.” This seems to me to accept (as I do) that the arguments for the death penalty are more or less the same as those for just war: it is a horrible thing, but sometimes necessary.
If you seek office and the power that goes with it, your most pressing task is to stand between your fellow countrymen and evil. To do that, you must maintain armed forces capable of lethal violence and ready to inflict it. If you lack the courage and resolve to do this, then do not seek office in the first place. You are not qualified for it. The apparatus of the death penalty has exactly the same purpose, to defend the weak and good against the strong and evil, by placing a sharp sword in the hands of justice. This point also disposes of the most popular argument against the death penalty, the fear of executing the wrong person. This is indeed a strong point. It is why, now that our courts have been turned into a shameful politicised and emotionalised travesty of justice, I could not possibly support the return of the gallows until major reforms have taken place.
The most important would be to end majority verdicts, a grave weakening of jury independence. Jurors should also be subject to stricter qualifications, perhaps educational, perhaps based on experience of life — 18 is certainly too young. Judges need to be more willing and more free to halt trials where they believe the prosecution is employing emotion rather than evidence. The appalling evidence-free condemnation of the nurse Lucy Letby to a slow living death demands a sweeping upheaval of police and courts which would take years to achieve.
But that is a particular point, not a general rule. In general, a well-ordered justice system, watched over by a free independent press, would rarely execute an innocent person, especially with the safeguards provided by modern science. But do those who claim that the fear of killing one innocent person is enough to disarm the state really mean what they say? This is a pacifist argument, and I would respect it if those who made it admitted that its logic means leaving the country defenceless against any enemy, and accepting the consequences — subjugation, impoverishment, extinction of liberty — which would follow.
But few are so principled. Worse, many modern liberals, while denouncing capital punishment, are all too keen on idealistic foreign adventures in which innocents die. I think of the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia, the lawless 2003 invasion of Iraq, and David Cameron’s allegedly benevolent bombing of Libya in 2011, though the pretext for that has long been exploded. You might not like to read this brief and terrible description of a scene in Libya, after a Nato bombing raid, written by that very fine reporter Martin Fletcher. “In a hospital at Sabratha, 50 miles west of Tripoli, lay 11 corpses, perhaps more,” Fletcher wrote. “Their state was such that a precise count was impossible. Three were identifiably young children, though little more than the head of one remained. One journalist fainted at the sight.”
But this was done on the watch of a prime minister who once said of capital punishment: “There have been too many cases of things going wrong, of the wrong people being executed, of evidence coming to light after the execution, and sometimes there is just too much of an element of doubt. And I just don’t honestly think that in a civilised society like ours that you can have the death penalty any more.” And yet he started a war of choice, to give his conscience a bit of exercise in a foreign field. These people do not really mean what they say. Innocents may die, as long as they are far away. They can also die, as Jean Charles Menezes did, at the hands of armed police, and nothing will happen.
