The bizarre timing of the death penalty debate

You don't have to be a genius to see where this one is heading: a summer silly season of media and internet campaigning ends in a Commons vote on capital punishment, which, after the Liberal Democrats team up with (most, but not all) Labour MPs, is defeated. Cue howls of fury by death penalty "campaigners" about how we are run by an out-of-touch "liberal elite."

But let's rewind a second and ask whether that’s a fair account of what is going on here. Like its predecessor at the height of so-called "blue sky thinking," the current government has ill-advisedly thought up an "empowering" scheme whereby citizens can sign "e-petitions" resulting, if 100,000 signatures are gained for one issue, in a "debate."

As it happens, the numbers supporting the reintroduction of the death penalty, which have been over-hyped by certain right-wing blogs, fall way short of that target. But it doesn't take much to create a headline these days, and the government itself has scored several own goals. First of all, it was painfully naive to introduce a supposedly bottom-up, California-style plebiscite system. There is a reason we live in a representative parliamentary democracy which protects minorities and individuals against the mob. Furthermore, it was questionable whether Sir George Young, the Leader of the Commons, should have written a piece in yesterday's Daily Mail welcoming such a debate in an attempt to defend "e-petitions." It would be interesting to know the circumstances behind that article: whether or not the holidaying Prime Minister was aware of it and to what extent government figures—including the old Etonian Sir George—were panicking about being labeled "out of touch."

But there is a much more important reason why this sudden, apparently randomly timed "debate" is so absurd. It emerges just as sections of the British criminal justice system are being exposed, partially at least, as incompetent, unaccountable and corrupt. There might be valid arguments for the death penalty in certain exceptional cases if we lived in a world in which we could trust the criminal justice system never to get it wrong, in which the police do not set up suspects, DNA is not tampered with and the media, some sections of which seem so close to the police, remain impartial. But as we have seen so many times before, our criminal justice system often gets it wrong, and has done for a long time. It is quite extraordinary that we are seeing a context-free "debate" about the death penalty at the same time that police corruption is being laid bare.