With the Pound at a low ebb in the exchange markets, this would do wonders for promoting the tourist industry in Britain. Even BA might attract more passengers.

Seriously, I do wonder why we in Britain have such a strong sense of nostalgia for capital and corporal punishments compared with other west European countries.

You’ve obviously not watched that demo by Rowan Atkinson.

We’re not Singapore, there are so many differences between our societies that may influence people’s behaviour that to suggest their crime rate is attributable to corporal punishment is simply facile.

We’ve got loads of prisoners because we’ve got loads of crimes. Labour have increased the number of imprisonable crimes by 3000 since 1997 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/dec/10/conrad-black-labour-law-crime).

To deal with the most deprived, crime-blighted hotspots requires the investment of public money and police resources no politician has the guts to deliver in our tabloid-dominated politics.

Corporal punishment would relieve the pressures on the over-worked probation service and by reducing the necessity for custodial sentences help George Osborne to cut the fiscal deficit.

Try this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVeqBbnLkt0

You’d really have to say why you think it would have been so wrong to have killed any of those three people. Surely their ‘right to life’ doesn’t come into it?

Why not?

I happen to think its always wrong because of the risk of miscarriages of justice, the effect on innocent relatives and what it does to society as a whole, among other reasons.

Killing criminals like West because of tabloid behaviour suggests a degree of confusion in your thinking.

Wrong from who’s point of view? Not fair to them?
Or in someway injurious to the society doing it?
As well as a ”lust for revenge” there is also a possibility of putting some horrible episode ”to bed” so to speak.

I think that that’s been done with the three people I mentioned. Two executed and Fred West killing himself.
Did we really need to be hearing Fred West stories for the next 30 years?

Anyway, I only took this position to see if it was possible to say something against the liberal consensus that capital punishment is always wrong.

It’s mostly wrong is my opinion.

I don’t think anyone denies people’s right to life.

You are falling into the trap of conflating the crime with the punishment. While some countries are happy with the death penalty to appease their citizens’ lust for revenge or for simple economic reasons many others, happily ours included, have decided that two wrongs do not make a right.

And as you can see, the Washington sniper killed all races.
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Cah6rQ0gp0E/Rdd8vaCJ-BI/AAAAAAAAAM4/1vkALoo79Ac/s320/sniper-victims.jpg

I was only trying to make the theoretical point that a total rejection of any kind of capital punishment in any situation isn’t always the one with the higher moral authority.

And it’s not me deciding who should be topped in reality, but just regretting that a few people from time to time, can’t be.

You’d really have to say why you think it would have been so wrong to have killed any of those three people. Surely their ‘right to life’ doesn’t come into it?

Beyond serious doubt, Britain was the superpower of the 19th century, due mainly to the supremacy of the Royal Navy. Quite why the Royal Navy was so good in sea battles, relative to other potential naval powers, is a matter for informed discussion but it was good. One reason is that British ships-of-the-line had a significantly faster rate of fire power than their opponents and that mattered in an exchange of broadsides. Another reason was the better discipline of RN seamen – try French accounts marvelling at the way in which seamen made their battle-torn ships ready to face a coming storm after the battle of Trafalgar 1805.

Churchill’s famous retort early in the last last century to someone extolling the “traditions of the Royal Navy” was to attribute the traditions to “rum, sodomy and the lash”. That could explain a lot.

This educational sketch by Rowan Atkinson illuminates:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YBeguUvuDzs

I’m not sure about the morality arguments about what it says about us as a people (to kill the odd person now and again).

Because we do not have the moral or legal right (in peace-time), except in self-defence or the defence of others against an imminent threat.

An additional curiosity is that we keep in indefinite secure detention some deemed insane but who undoubtedly were implicated in serial homicides. And there are also the horrific cases of children who murder, such as the case of Mary Bell:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/85396.stm

Those who have carefully considered whether the facts in America show that capital punishment acts as as deterrent there have concluded from the evidence that it does not:
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance/teaching_aids/books_articles/JLpaper.pdf

In all, I’m more at ease as a citizen from knowing that we no longer have capital punishment in Britain.

Under Islamic law, adultery is a capital offence which would likely have serious consequences for our national sport of football if Sharia law were introduced here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoning

I think you can take the ”sanctity of human life” thing a bit far.
Che Guevara did what he thought had to be done.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article2461399.ece
So did Lenin.

Some people are so stupid you’d think they had a death wish.
Smuggling heroin into Malaysia??
http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/index.php/malaysia/53469-two-pakistanis-iranian-arrested-with-rm15m-worth-of-drugs

Presumably, this is outrageous interference in Iran’s internal affairs by another of those bleeding hearts organizations::

“Amnesty International has urged the Iranian authorities not to execute nine people sentenced to death who were arrested in relation to the protests that followed last year’s disputed presidential election.”
http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/news/nine-risk-execution-over-iran-protests-20100202

“If Virginia people want that, then that’s their business.”

Of course, but it says a lot about them too.

You keep mentioning the Washington Sniper. How about considering all the mentally ill, the 18 year-olds and poorly represented disadvantaged who have been executed in the Land of the Free?

I am very proud that we long ago realised that the death penalty is not a form of justice suitable for a civilised country.

This was a jury trial and the defendant was duly convicted, sentenced to death and duly hanged at Newgate on 8 November 1797 according to the records of executions shown in my previous post..

Perhaps of special interest is the cross examination during the trial of the victim, Jane Bell, which seems to me to have been relatively kindly by modern day standards, even if inevitably clinical at times.

Note the last execution at Tyburn by hanging on 7 November 1783. Only a small minority of those executed had been convicted of murder; most executions were for crimes against property, which rather illuminates social priorities. Of those executed, 3 women were burned at the stake for coining, which was High Treason. For reasons of public decency, legislation provided that women convicted of High Treason were to be burned at the stake instead of being hanged, drawn and quartered.

Newgate prison was substantially damaged in the (anti-Catholic) Gordon riots of 1780 and subsequently rebuilt, reopening in 1782. Executions were transferred from Tyburn to Newgate. Every Monday morning, crowds gathered outside the prison to watch the executions, which were a form of popular entertainment until public executions were abolished in 1868. Thereafter, the executions were conducted inside the Newgate prison until it was finally closed in 1902.

which gifts £1.2bn to the top 2 per cent of wealthiest estates

The implication is that somehow everything you have belongs to the state, and they are being generous by ‘gifting’ it back to you. Who ought to decide what is done with the money? The recently deceased who, you know, worked for that money, or the state who would probably use it to employ 20,000 outreach workers or racism awareness councillors?

Isn’t it also funny that critics only talk of the richest 2 per cent when they talk of these proposals. No mention at all of those who no longer have to pay inheritance tax at all. Perhaps I should be asking you why you think people who own a two bedroom flat in Camden (asking price, £450,000 according to rightmove) should pay over £40,000 in tax when they pass on their ‘estate’?

EDIT: Reformatted – feel free to delete my previous comment

Perhaps the capital punishment fetishists feel that these changes show we have become weak. Compassion and understanding aren’t signs of weakness.

As others have pointed out, how many hangers and floggers consider themselves Christian or “pro life”?

I would have hoped we could move on from this sterile “debate.”