0
0
The monotonous tyranny of grey, dull, and plastic politics that has defined our current Prime Minister’s time in office has finally been punctuated with an interesting media story, and perhaps an even more interesting political question – the death penalty. I’m sure this excitement is something the Sunak team are frantically panicking about, and just as certain that the sun will rise tomorrow, the unending boredom of current politics will again oppressively linger over us, all in due course. So, in this brief window of the excitement of a supposed scandal, I shall lay out my case for why this shocked, indignant reaction is unwarranted, even if exciting; then lay out why I think the government is foolish to pretend that it doesn’t agree with Mr. Anderson.
Recently, the inevitable cabinet reshuffle happened, and in and amongst the boring shifting around of essentially interchangeable suit-clad ministers to different roles in cabinet, a one Mr. Lee Anderson was selected to be Deputy Chairman of the Conservative party. I was not all too aware of Anderson, but that was soon to change with the alarmed reaction of much of the press who dragged up clips of Anderson advocating the reinstatement of the death penalty, something which is something unimaginable in the minds of much of modern Britain’s ‘enlightened’ media class. This perspective (the advocating of the death penalty) is an apparently radical perspective – a view uniquely held by those most hard-right of Tories, a group who occupy a particular and privileged space in the mind of the respectable middle-class partisans. They say, the death penalty was abolished decades ago, and it is totally inconceivable to many as to why anyone with any semblance of rationality would wish for its return. The beautiful veil of an ‘anti-death penalty’ consensus is formed, and for many years it has served as an effective barrier preventing any important politician from trespassing beyond its limits – fearing that if they do, they’ll be uninvited from those all-important dinner parties.
Yet this consensus, like many other fictions of the respectable middle-class mind, is but an illusion cast by ignorance and an overwhelming in-group self-centeredness. Far from being a barren wasteland beyond the veil, a bountiful crop of support exists for the reinstatement of the death penalty in the UK – a spring of support that, if activated, would form a formidable movement, like the Leave campaign. Indeed, numerous polls of the British public show that support for reinstating the death penalty is over 50% of the vote in response to major crimes like terrorism. This support is hardly differentiated by age group, unlike many would expect, with the same poll showing that even 42% of the most liberal people, young people (those between the ages of 18-24), support the reinstatement of the death penalty for terrorists.
Both the strength of the arguments against the death penalty generally, and the popularity of the death penalty for particularly abhorrent crimes seem to have been vastly miscalculated by many in the media. To suggest that Anderson is somehow indicted by his belief, which seems to be in line with at least a sizable portion of the country, seems both absurd, and entirely unconvincing considering the nature of the debate at hand. Terrorism, mass murder, and paedophilia are moral crimes of such an abhorrent nature that it is unsurprising at best that many would consider the death penalty an appropriate punishment for such heinous offences. However, many would say that the various moral arguments against the death penalty are sufficiently persuasive to suggest that its reinstatement would be a moral crime in and of itself. So, I will now attempt to analyse one of the most popular appeals against the morality of the death penalty.
One of the most typical formulations of the appeal against the death penalty is the truism that ‘all human life is precious’. Such a statement is supposed to wash away all other considerations in a feel-good cleansing of our old, evil, complex moral feelings about the crimes that are in consideration. This phrase is a trump-card, the ultimate argument that cannot be denied, lest one accidentally fall into a variety of moral traps, designed to cause social death if one is too injudicious in their use of their language. Yet, such an argument seems flawed; it fails because it doesn’t adequately qualify the value of human life generally. Indeed, human life has an enormous value, that is precisely why it is not acceptable to engage in mass murder and terrorism. The criminal will have precisely destroyed and stolen that value from society through their actions, and upon a certainty of their guilt, there is a debt that must be paid, and this sense of proportional debt is one of the foundations of our justice system. To say that the criminal’s life has value is to rebuke nothing, indeed they have great value – hence the necessity of a truly free and fair trial, proper standards of justice, sufficient waiting time for potential new evidence, but upon reaching an undeniable conclusion of guilt, that value is surpassed in the weighing of importance by the proportional harm and damage they have inflicted.
Our current system accepts this logic, issuing ‘whole life orders’ to those who commit the most heinous of crimes, using long prison sentences as means of retribution and the criminal moving towards their repayment of that debt to society, and indefinite prison time becomes the means of execution. This state of affairs seems more inhumane to me than the death penalty. It asks that the guilty party languish in prison, despite their crimes being beyond any possible redemption in the eyes of human society, waiting for death to come. So I ask, is this truly better than being executed? It seems to me to be a superfluous humiliation that does nothing to conceal the truly desired result, the death of the prisoner.
Of course, no moral person believes the death penalty should be applied lightly or without significant, consistent, and perhaps costly oversight or review. We must always be vigilant about all forms of human law and justice, never letting our system lower its rigorous standards of fairness and law, regardless of the level of punishment. But it is wrong to say that there are no crimes that warrant the application of this controversial form of punishment. Human life is extraordinarily valuable, and it is precisely that value that condemns the mass murderer and terrorist to their fate. When our media, and our political establishment more broadly, act as though the death penalty is something with only a fringe support, and that our current system with its own thinly-veiled death orders is so much better, so much so that it is a scandal when a minister supports the death penalty, it should be more shocking to people the fact they do so irrespective of public opinion and sentiment about the issue, and further despite the rational moral arguments in favour of its use.
The government has consistently said that reinstating the death penalty is not something that it supports, but many within it insist on defending Lee Anderson. So, I can come to no other conclusion but that many within the government secretly agree with Anderson. This reality, where the fictitious consensus against the death penalty restrains our government ministers, can only be described as another of the features of our “centrist” age. Perhaps when the government runs out of other ideas to win back their disillusioned supporters, they’ll pick up this idea, and finally it will be not surprising to hear that a prominent person supports the ultimate price as punishment for the most heinous of crimes like Mr. Anderson does.
Average Rating