Death penalty is back

Supporters of the death penalty shouldn’t rejoice, and nor should its opponents lament: capital punishment hasn’t been reintroduced.

However, thanks to Lee Anderson, new deputy leader of the Tories, it’s again being discussed. That is a step in the right direction.

Since I don’t follow political rough-and-tumble with unremitting intensity, all I know about Mr Anderson comes from the articles written about him since last week’s cabinet reshuffle in which he gained his post.

I know he once threatened to beat up a heckler, but I’m not sure fisticuffs is a proper way of dealing with opposition. I do like parliamentary brawlers, but only when they are that way figuratively. This is England after all.

Then Mr Anderson visited Calais, didn’t like what he saw and proposed that all illegal migrants crossing the Channel should be put on a naval frigate and shipped back the same day.

He also helpfully explained why those people want to come to Britain: “They are seeing a country where the streets are paved with gold – where, once you land, they are not in that manky little fucking scruffy tent. They are going to be in a four-star hotel.”

I’m more comfortable with the essence of that statement than with its form. Five modifiers before the word ‘tent’ are at least three too many, and one I’d drop first is the sexual intensifier. However, I can see that it’s stylistically consistent with physically threatening Mr Anderson’s detractors.

And then there is the death penalty, which both Mr Anderson and I both support – he, unequivocally; I, with some reservations.

Anticipating your question, no, the idea of marrying the two subjects, the death penalty and his distaste for illegal migrants, didn’t seem to have crossed Mr Anderson’s mind. He didn’t suggest those lawbreakers be summarily executed.

Nor, more to the point, did he say what we should do if the French refuse to take them back. Shell Calais? Just a thought.

As for the death penalty, I’ve listed my own pros and cons often enough, and Mr Anderson mentioned some of the same, one of each.

I always dismiss arguments against the deterrent value of capital punishment by pointing out that it undoubtedly deters the executed criminal. Mr Anderson expressed the same thought: “Nobody has ever committed a crime after being executed. You know that, don’t you? 100 per cent success rate.”

The most obvious objection to hanging is the possibility of a mistake. One can say, using the same logic, that no man unjustly executed has ever come back to life either.

However, that doesn’t prove that the law providing for the death penalty is wrong – only that it’s sometimes abused. I always suggest that the way around that would be to tighten the standards of proof required whenever capital punishment is on the table.

I’d be happy to see “beyond reasonable doubt” replaced in such cases with “beyond all doubt”, which condition would be met, for example, if a murder was caught on a surveillance camera or seen by numerous eyewitnesses.

Mr Anderson illustrated that argument by citing the example of Lee Rigby, the fusilier murdered by Muslim fanatics:

“Now I’d be very careful on that one because you’ll get the certain groups saying: ‘You can never prove it.’ Well, you can prove it if they have videoed it and are on camera – like the Lee Rigby killers.”

All these are sound arguments (I would say that, wouldn’t I?), but they skirt around the issue, avoiding the ultimate question: Do fallen and therefore fallible people have the moral right to take a criminal’s life?

The moment the world ‘moral’ comes up we should backtrack to the source – or at least the code – of our morality: Scripture. Whichever Testament one chooses to peruse, one won’t find an injunction against the death penalty.

Moreover, when Scripture was indeed recognised as the source – or at least the code – of our morality, the validity of the death penalty for murder was never in doubt. People knew then that capital punishment wasn’t a denial of the value of human life but its assertion.

No length of imprisonment was then deemed sufficient to offset the wanton taking of a life. Justice could only be served by a punishment commensurate with the crime.

When people still relied on reason rather than emotions to ponder such issues, they saw it was illogical to deny the state’s right to impose the death penalty while at the same time recognising its right to wage war. If sending thousands of good men to die for a just cause was moral, then how could executing a bad man for a just reason be wrong?

The morality of most people is selective. It’s not that we consciously decide to obey some moral dicta and ignore others – it’s just that we all tend to have in our heads some pecking order of moral laws.

Even the Decalogue’s commandments are arranged in descending order of importance, but our own order isn’t necessarily the same. Few of us, for example, see being nasty to our parents as a sin worse than murder, and yet the latter is further down the list.

Yes, we all have our preferences, but only the Church can preserve the entirety of the Revelation in a cohesive form. And no apostolic confession, nor traditional Protestantism, nor any other Abrahamic religion, has ever proscribed the death penalty.

Because life was assumed to be eternal, physical death wasn’t seen as the worst punishment. Everlasting damnation was, and a criminal could avoid or mitigate it by repenting his evil. The only crime that couldn’t be repented was suicide, which is why suicides were denied Christian burial, but murderers weren’t.

I realise how little such – or as a matter of fact any other – arguments from tradition matter to the modern lot. I’ve had the occasion to debate this issue with them on the BBC, only to realise there was no point.

It’s not just capital punishment they see as abhorrent, but any punishment as such. They come precious close to denying any punitive function of imprisonment, for example, seeing it as merely an extension of a self-improvement session by other means.

This line of thought was pioneered by Leo Tolstoy, who insisted that “no one has ever been made better by imprisonment”. First, that statement was factually incorrect. For example, Dostoyevsky clearly emerged from his penal colony a better man.

Second, that missed the whole point of punishment. It’s to make lives better for the good people outside, not for the bad people inside. And a valid argument can be made that the death penalty serves this end well.

Mr Anderson clearly thinks so, although I’m not sure he is capable of dwelling on this issue in sufficient depth. A punch in the snout seems closer to his preferred debating technique.

But hey, it takes all sorts… Just as I wrote that I remembered my late friend Bill Campbell who told me some forty years ago: “It doesn’t really take all sorts, we just have all sorts”.

I’ll leave you with Bill’s words of wisdom (he, by the way, not only supported the death penalty, but would have been happy to administer it personally). Especially since he looked like a dead ringer for Mr Anderson.