Bullying the Commons to death

The claim by the Leader of the British House of Commons, Sir George Young, that public engagement with the political process will be revived by an e-petition for a parliamentary debate on the death penalty is both meretricious and retrogressive. To start with, the new e-petitions, which were mentioned in the 2010 Conservative Party manifesto, are riddled with problems. They rely on self-selection by those of the public who choose to participate; this makes the results highly unreliable as an index of representativeness, with further problems arising from the way a petition is worded. In addition, the threshold for a petition to be considered by the Commons for debate is 100,000 signatures, merely 0.16 per cent of the British population. Moreover, access is restricted to internet users. Sir George also fails to mention that such petitions bind neither Parliament nor the government; his own Cabinet colleague, Secretary of State for Education Michael Gove, has announced that he will ignore one signed by 140,000 people requesting him not to exclude religious education from an English school-leaving certificate.

As for the substantive issue involved, bringing back the death penalty, the Commons Leader is indulging in calculated and crude populism. In the United Kingdom, the subject of capital punishment arouses strong feelings, to which people have every right, but the last executions occurred in 1964. In 1969, Parliament abolished the death penalty for murder; in 1998 it confirmed the ban by incorporating almost the whole of the European Convention on Human Rights, which proscribes capital punishment in peacetime. The same principle is also laid down by the European Union in its Charter of Fundamental Rights. Were the U.K. to restore capital punishment, it would almost certainly be expelled from the EU and would face suspension from the Council of Europe, the custodian of the European Convention. Such consequences apart, the British Tory-led coalition government is in effect ignoring the inherent dangers and evils of this form of punishment.

For example, had the penalty been in force over the last two decades, the U.K. would almost certainly have executed two completely innocent people, Colin Stagg and Christopher Jefferies, for murder after vicious media witch-hunts, which in turn may well have made fair trials impossible for them. Furthermore, recently published evidence of police-media collusion has undermined confidence in the British criminal justice system. It is therefore essential for the House of Commons to resist Sir George's attempt to bully it towards restoring the barbaric and utterly anachronistic death penalty. TheHindu.com