on the prospects for human sacrifice

One of the arguments against David Davis is that we shouldn’t get behind his belief that people should not be held for extended periods without charge because he also believes that some of these charges should carry the death penalty.

Back in ’97 I laid a bet with friends, more out of mischief than anything else, that New Labour would bring back the death penalty before it left office. I don’t think it’s entirely a dead letter.

Imagine: it’s 2009, the polls are still lousy and there’s one more legislative session to go before electoral doom awaits. The government needs something big. It needs something bold. It needs something butch. Above all, it needs something tough, as it always does. It needs something that sends a signal to criminals, that tells the public we are on your side.

There are obviously practical reasons why re-introducing the death penalty would be difficult, not least because no EU member is allowed to have it. But that’s not a deal breaker these days, what with all the talk of a vari-speed Europe, and it allows for demagoguing about standing up to the Eurocrats. Anyway, if the EU can put up with Berlusconi, it can probably put up with anything.

Of course, there’d be principled opposition from the Labour Party, so much of which we saw the other week. No problem there then. It's also a good wedge issue against the Tories. The Lords? Maybe a different matter. But these are practical difficulties. What else - other than that it maybe hasn't occured to them - is stopping them?

Comments

[Madam Miaow]

Oh my god that is a horrible notion. But entirely possible. You must stop giving them ideas.

[Phil]

A while ago, looking at some documentation on Nazi policy in the East, I came to the conclusion that the Final Solution was functionally inevitable. After a certain point (which I don't remember, but it was certainly before Wannsee) they were committed simultaneously to shunting Jews into a void called Poland, bringing home ethnic Germans from a subhuman hellhole called Poland and providing living-space for ethnic Germans by settling them in newly Germanised territory carved out of a blank space called Poland. In other words, Nazi policy for Poland was to dump more and more Untermenschen in a smaller and smaller area. Something had to give, and we know what it was.

In an odd kind of way, that's what New Labour's policy on prisons reminds me of. They can't seem to think about crime without having prison in the background - anything less would be a soft option. So every new angle on crime they come up with turns into a new group of people going to prison (on the most recent statistics, 55% of ASBOs are breached, and 40% of breaches lead to prison time). So the prisons get fuller and fuller, and you can't start letting out the people you've only just started sending there, because that would be a U-turn - and you certainly can't let out the people who've been there all along, because they're dangerous - so where's the space going to come from?

Which is to say, that thought's crossed my mind too.

[Chris Williams]

Execution? Hmm... But if I lived on St Helena, I'd pay a lot of money to monopolise every concrete mixer on the island.

[alle]

A while ago, looking at some documentation on Nazi policy in the East, I came to the conclusion that the Final Solution was functionally inevitable. [...] In an odd kind of way, that's what New Labour's policy on prisons reminds me of.

New Labour ultra-functionalist, eh? I'd go with cumulative radicalization.

[Alex]

The Grauniad reported, a few weeks ago, that Jack Straw's "Titan - Now With 200% Added Toughosity! (*Funding Not Included)" jails won't actually be built for the advertised 2,500 cons/jail but instead 2,000, and will reach the target through "planned overcrowding".

If that's not designing-in the permanent crisis, I don't know what is.

[ejh]

High unlikely, though, isn't it? In the first place, there's no actually that much pressure to bring back the death penalty. In the second, there's no reason to think either that it would benefit New Labour or that they think it would (or would think it would, if I may permit myself some convoluted syntax). In the third, it's possible that one of the lessons of the defeat of Michael Howard (or of Rajoy, where I am) is that sometimes we don't want our politicians to do the things that we want - sometimes when they do that, we find ourselves looking at ourselves and don't like it. One would hope so.

[SimonK]

I'm sure it would at least have occurred to Blunko, bearing in mind his champagne/Shipman remarks, but I think there are too many institutional obstacles for it to be a real prospect.

[septicisle]

Probably the one thing holding them back is that not even the Sun any longer supports bringing back capital punishment; when it went crazy a few months back after the Newlove/Bowman/Ipswich serial killer cases, claiming that 99% of its readers back bringing it back, the paper's editorial did its best to try damp down the enthusiasm it had created:

http://www.septicisle.info/2008/02/scum-watch-lesson-in-attempting-to.html

[redpesto]

I don't think hanging's a runner. A state of emergency on the other hand...