Another voice
Waiting for Goddard
Auberon Waugh
Nobody I knew has ever been hanged, and very few have been murdered. Off-hand, I can only think of poor James PopeHennessy. I was sorry to see him go, of course, but suspect that the risk of violence or sudden death may be part of the thrill for those with his particular tastes. Nor could I see how it would make the situation any better if the wretched man who murdered him was sent to be hanged. Those who are loudest in their demands for the restoration of capital punishment must either have peculiar tastes of their own or must be suffering from some failure of the imagination which prevents them from seeing that judicial execution can never cancel or remove the atrocity it seeks to punish; it can only add a second atrocity to the original one.
The trouble with a referendum on the abstract point is that it protects voters from the consequence of their action. If hangings were shown on television as Mr Peregrine Worsthorne recommends, voters would at least know what they had voted for. A jol lier idea might be to have a separate referendum for each hanging or, on the prin ciple of the Athenian ostracisms, citizens might be invited to nominate candidates for hanging. Public executions are popular events in var ious parts of Africa, but I doubt whether they would be very popular here, just as I doubt whether, if we were asked to cast our votes against named individuals, many would do it.
Of course, I may be wrong. It is possible that public executions would prove immensely popular, that referenda in every case would keep the hangman busier than he has been since the Bloody Assizes. One could argue that since capital punishment for murder can only be of inconvenience to a tiny minority, and since the idea of it — if not the practice — gives such enormous comfort — if not actual pleaspre — to a huge number, then it should be allowed on the principle of the greatest happiness for the greatest number.
It goes without saying that a few innocent men and women will always suffer, but I do not think that has ever been a very serious objection to the principle of capital punishment. Innocent men and women are just as likely to fall down a manhole which has been left uncovered. There it: almost no end to the list of unpleasant things which can happen to an innocent man or woman. Someone in a Graham Greene short story, as I remember, was killed by a cow or pig falling from a balcony on his head. All these incidents provide an opportunity to ponder the fragility of human happiness, but blame must attach to the negligent man-hole coverer, balcony builder, to the stupid or cruel judge rather than to the man-hole principle, the balcony system, the idea of the death penalty.
As readers of this page will be aware, I believe that Timothy Evans was guilty bey ond any question of doubt of the murder for which he was hanged in 1950, and wish Mrs Thatcher would promise to revoke the free pardon so recklessly handed out by Mr Roy Jenkins sixteen years later, even if it means passing a special Act of Attainder. But
nobody who has studied our courts closely can doubt that several innocent men have been hanged. It is a sobering thought, is it not? that the same Lord Goddard who presided over the notorious 1957 libel action, Bevan and others v Spectator, was not only in a position to send men to the gallows but frequently did so, usually (by all accounts) with a horrible smile playing about his lips.
The main objection to killing people as a punishment is not, as I say, that innocent people will be killed. It is that killing people is wrong. Two wrongs don't make a right. One could get away with it in a religious age, when one could at least pretend to believe that, shriven and prepared for death (as Evans and Hanratty were shriven), such people had a better chance of eternal salvation than they might normally have had. But in an irreligious age, when there is no further hope, it can't be done. So long as one sees killing as wrong there is no need to waste time with the deterrent argument, since it would be nonsense to try to prevent a theoretical evil in the future by perpetrating an act ual one in the present.
Others may see the end of capital punishment as part of the general collapse of discipline in our society, illustrated as it is by the daily difficulty of finding someone else to clean one's shoes. I agree that the shoe problem is serious, but I do not think that hanging is necessarily the answer. And it is here, in the strange barren ground between the frustration of cleaning one's own shoes and a muddled, self-righteous belief in retributive justice, that one should look most closely. If Paris was worth a Mass to Henri IV, surely Westminster must be worth the odd topping of some malevolent lout to Mrs Thatcher? An end to the puni
tive taxation which is tearing our poor coil try apart? The reintroduction of seconcla education, suppression of the Equal OppOf tunities Commission, Arts Council, Opt University; Doctors Owen and Donough back to their respective surgeries? Th prospect is too delightful to contemplah without risk of sin and the price — of stretch ing a few criminals against our better jud ment — seems absurdly low. Put like thin the temptation is formidable.
But I am afraid that Mrs Thatcher he made a grave electoral miscalculation. S misjudges the quality of support for capi punishment and the quality of opposition it. No life-long Labour voter, howe working-class, is going to vote Tory to br back the rope, but many Liberal voters Wil` might have voted Tory will refuse to do so. A the key to the next general election, as GO frey Wheatcroft pointed out last week, is Liberal collapse. A majority of worker! may, on balance, be in favour of capita punishment but it is a luxury opinion of veil little relevance to their daily lives, and thi great suburban Liberal vote is made almost entirely of people who feel vet) strong indeed about capital punishment and have already allowed it to determine their votes. Far from making her election moil certain, she is putting it at risk. Judicial killing has been found necessaq as an instrument for promoting soci° change; time and again it has proved necu'j sary to maintain the great social advances° the revolutionary working class — I do 10 think there is a single socialist country in the world which does not have the death pc° alty, often for trivial economic offences. the great libertarian and very wonderf° man Mr. Roy Hattersley may yet live te assure us, the greatest freedom for all freedom from error. But Conservatives tal" Liberals should acknowledge that the defence of private property is neither se urgent as to require this degree of fieedeln nor so noble as to sanctify it. Let dog delight to bark and bite for God hath made them so. The working classes may enjo); hanging each other because it is the sort(/' thing they understand but we should reall/f not encourage them in case they hang one° us by mistake. Lord Goddard is waiting Or us, a wintry smile playing around his thin' red lips. . . But there is one serious question I would like to plant like a grain of sand in the oyster of readers' minds — gentle, intelligent: kindly, educated readers of the Spectator who can somehow still afford the 30p. He is is: if the majority cannot be allowed t° decide about capital punishment, wilY should it be allowed to decide about an.Y: thing? If readers can ponder this and real' the conclusion that majority preference! are, by and large, things to be avoided ntlu where possible frustrated, they will have taken a giant stride towards that tranquil of mind which, in an irreligious age, must the place of our being's end and aim. But capital punishment, at least, let us agree that the People must not decide.
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