The argument in favour of capital punishment is not often made nowadays by senior politicians in this country, and for good reason. It has been 58 years since we abolished the death penalty, consigning it to the murky depths of mid-20th-century history, along with polio and pea-souper fogs.
The UK is also a signatory to the European convention of human rights, which in 1983 enacted protocol 6, which prohibits capital punishment in peacetime. The countries that are the most active executioners – China, Saudi Arabia, Iran – are hardly models of enlightened criminal justice. And on top of that, most Britons are opposed to the reintroduction of the death penalty.
So it may appear as though the Conservative party’s new deputy chairman, Lee Anderson, made a clumsy mistake when he told an interviewer shortly before his appointment that he supports the return of capital punishment, on the grounds that “nobody has ever committed a crime after being executed”.
Such a conclusion, however, would do both Anderson and Rishi Sunak, the man who appointed him, a disservice. The MP for the “red wall” seat of Ashfield knew exactly what he was up to in hailing capital punishment’s “100% success rate” against recidivism. And Sunak understood precisely what he was getting when he made him Greg Hands’s deputy.
Strategists argue that, after the calamitous premiership of Liz Truss, the cost of living crisis has left Tory-held former Labour seats especially vulnerable. In the absence of cash to hasten the government’s faltering levelling up policy, Anderson, the “red wall rottweiler”, is the low-cost means of wooing marginal constituencies.
Yet the calculation that informs his appointment runs deeper than that. There is a reason that the Tory party is on its fourth leader in four years. It contains a significant and ungovernable minority of avowedly rightwing MPs whom leaders either appease or, in Boris Johnson’s and Truss’s case, represent.
Sunak clearly reckons that Anderson within the tent spouting outwards is more productive than the other way around. The problem is not the cynicism of that equation but its false accounting. In politics, if you don’t mark out your ground, it’s marked out for you. Look at the US Republican party. Not long ago, it thought it could accommodate the populist Tea Party movement and now it has been captured by a coalition of extremists and fantasists, many of whom push a capital punishment agenda.
It would be complacent to assume that such a development could not take place in the UK. Yes, most Britons do oppose capital punishment, but not when it comes to serial murders, terrorism and the killing of children, where a small majority supports execution. That majority grows the higher up you go in age and the further to the right you go in politics. As the Tory membership is to the right of its voters and is disproportionately elderly, the death penalty has a lot of policy potential in constituency politics. One particularly grisly murder could get a campaign going.
And as Sunak has already let it be known that he is prepared to withdraw the UK from the European court of human rights if it contests his plans to curb illegal migration, a major hurdle could soon be removed.
It would be alarmist to overstate the power of a provocateur politician’s attention-seeking words. Yet there is a battle being waged against liberal orthodoxies and, for all his centrist, safe-pair-of-hands image, Sunak has just empowered a rabble-rouser in that cause.
Anderson is right. Capital punishment is effective. It would have stopped the Guildford Four, the Birmingham Six and the Bridgewater Four from committing any further terrorist or child murders. The only problem is they didn’t commit any in the first place.
