THE GOVERNMENT HAS JUST LAUNCHED its E Petition website. This site allows people to start a petition on a matter that concerns them; and if 100,000 signatures are collected on-line, the subject of the petition will be eligible for debate in parliament. This of course means that it will not be automatically debated; but will be “considered” by a committee of scrutinisers, to judge whether it is a fit and proper subject for parliamentary debate.
Now the Sun and the Guido website have decided that a debate should be held on the return of capital punishment. Whether, such a debate will be allowed if the 100,000 signatures are collected, is very unlikely; just as a debate on our continued membership of the EU or immigration, would also fall foul of the censors black pen.
But it is about time that parliament did debate the return of capital punishment. There is a general malaise among the British public on the issue crime generally. Many have given up reporting various crimes; and are despondent at the many incidences of people stepping in to help a victim, or attempt a citizen’s arrest; who have then found themselves locked up and facing punishment.
Capital punishment, if debated, would at least let the people now where our lawmakers stand on this issue at an individual level; and then, come the next election, to decide for themselves whether the issue would be enough to re-elect their MP, whether he or she be for or against capital punishment.
I BELIEVE IT IS INDEED TIME ( having been given the opportunity to do so by the E Petition), to gather support for a debate on capital punishment in parliament. For far too long have our politicians been allowed to ignore the wishes of the majority of people, who, poll after poll suggests, support its reintroduction.
We pride ourselves on being the oldest democracy whose customs and practices have been copied by other countries. The fact that universal suffrage (the true requirement of any proper democracy) is just over 80 years old, seems to have been ignored when we boast of being the fully grown of all democracies.
Such a boast should be challenged. Does our modern parliament accede to the people’s wishes and allow a debate in parliament on the return of capital punishment, providing 100,000 signatories are found to support such an ambition? Or would the committee of scrutinisers brush the issue under the carpet?
MY OWN VIEW ON CAPITAL PUNISHMENT has fluctuated somewhat over my 61 years. I have taken the position that began with out and out opposition; believing that the state had not moral right to hang, draw and quarter, or burn and gas its citizens.
I then, after some twenty-one years of consistency, from the age of 19 to 30, began to ask myself; why should not the state in a democracy have the right to hang, burn, or gas murderers ? After all, such people would have committed the ultimate crime by so cruelly depriving their victims of the one thing they themselves were still able to cling to – life itself.
It is not (for me at least) a matter of an eye for an eye. Although it appears a wholly sensible approach to the situation that may, in the modern age, and after decades of liberal thought, actually prove helpful in bringing about a decline in murders in this country.
But if not, at least the transgressor of this ultimate of all crimes will know that if they forfeit another human beings life, they will surely forfeit their own. In other words a benchmark will have been set.
From the age of thirty my objection to capital punishment no longer embraced a moral argument for its resistance. But rather it became a matter of human fallibility and the prospect of the innocent being sent to the gallows and being unwittingly “man- slaughtered” by the state.
I could not still not support the re-introduction of capital punishment while such fallibility remained. Of course any system that encompasses the ultimate punishment will always fall foul of injustice. But with the introduction of the science of genetics into criminal pathology, such mistakes can be limited even further.
I believe, that with genetics, a benchmark has been reached that will make safe many more murder convictions, and once this threshold has been crossed, capital punishment, in my view at least, becomes not only practicable but justifiable.
You will be glad to know that I have no wish to see, as had been the case during our medieval past; human beings taken to ancient Tyburn (now Marble Arch) and hung, but with life remaining long enough to have their bellies emptied with the knife before their death; ahead of then having their bodies quartered.
CAPITAL PUNISHMENT should once more be placed within our judiciaries’ armoury. To speak of making such a punishment as humane as possible will not way-lay the liberal critics who will fight this reform to its end. But nevertheless, the most innocuous of ends should be the remit of any capital punishment: and any end should be brought via the most mildest of means.
We cannot continue in the same vein as before. To do so will further undermine the people’s respect for the criminal justice system. Capital punishment should once more be restored, or at the very least debated within parliament and both the Guido website and the Sun should be supported.
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