ARTICLE ON THE DEATH PENALTY OF THE WEEK [SUNDAY 2 SEPTEMBER 2012 TO SATURDAY 8 SEPTEMBER 2012]

NOTICE: The following article is written by the author itself and not by me, I am not trying to violate their copyright. I will give some information on them.

PAGE TITLE: http://www.publicserviceeurope.com/

ARTICLE TITLE: 'Wring necks not hands' - UK MEP supports death penalty return

DATE: Monday 8 August 2011

AUTHOR: Godfrey Bloom

AUTHOR INFORMATION: Godfrey Bloom (born 22 November 1949 in London) is a Member of the European Parliament for Yorkshire and the Humber for the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). He was first elected in 2004, and re-elected in 2009. Before becoming an MEP, Bloom worked as a financial economist. Godfrey Bloom is the president of the European Alliance for Freedom, a Eurosceptic pan-European political party.

URL: http://www.publicserviceeurope.com/article/713/wring-necks-not-hands-uk-mep-supports-death-penalty

Godfrey Bloom

In the UK a new website allowing citizens to petition the government has led one MEP to support a campaign to bring back the death penalty – here he explains why

I remember well the enormous impact the death penalty had when I was a youngster in the 1950s. Murder in the United Kingdom in those days was a rare event, while most Britons today under the age of forty have subconsciously accepted it as fact of modern life, somehow inevitable. This is simply not so.

Decadent, modern, mercantilist, pseudo-democratic states – that is, Europe and most of North America – have lost respect for the sanctity of human life. So poorly do they regard it that life imprisonment, which was promised as a substitute for the death penalty, has been left to wither on the vine as indeterminate sentences and modest minimum sentences replace it. It is far from unknown for murderers to be released in just seven or eight years and indeed kill again. Quite how the families of victims must feel as a result is beyond my comprehension.

A few years ago a colleague of mine was gunned down in his own house by a murdering, thieving swine who was already on bail for a violent offence. Obviously this low-life simply did not care. This contempt for society and human life was fatal. He and his ilk only understand one thing, and that is the enormity of just retribution by society against perpetration of these monstrous acts. Only by such an uncompromising response by the state can potential murderers be dissuaded from the ultimate crime. Such retribution successfully repressed the murder rate for generations before its shameful abandonment.

Statistics are impossible now to collate on the deterrence effect. What would have been murder forty years ago is often logged as manslaughter. For example: an old lady is bashed over the head for her purse, she temporarily recovers but dies a week later. Manslaughter. A husband goes into his front garden to protect the trashing of his car, and is kicked to death in front of his family by a gang of teenage thugs. Manslaughter. Bargaining by sharp lawyers gets charges altered in exchange for a guilty plea to a lesser charge. The statics become unworkable.

I hear all sorts of nonsense arguments advanced for the continued abolition of the death penalty. The ultimate is "it does not deter", as if that were measurable. John Stuart Mill made the point admirably in the House of Commons in 1868 that it was immeasurable but on the balance of probability it almost certainly deterred. I would urge everybody to Google it. It is unsurpassed. One might also argue that it is not healthy in a democracy to thwart the long standing massive majority in favour. This has always had a free vote in the Commons – meaning individual MPs can vote according to their own beliefs rather than stick to a party line – and political parties including my own have a loss of nerve when grasping the nettle of crime prevention.

Politicians who equivocate – that is, nearly all of them – must grow a backbone. It is necks that need wringing not hands. The state must take responsibility for its citizens' welfare before vigilantism raises its head and the respect for sentencing, already near to collapse, manifests itself in other ways. Of course it is all academic. We are bound by the Treaty of Lisbon and therefore cannot reintroduce capital punishment. We are no longer a self-governing country. But that is another story.

Godfrey Bloom is a UK Independence Party MEP for Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire