No Answer
UNDER the slogan 'Hanging's no answer' the National Campaign for the Abolition of Capital Punishment is—as it announces on • another page of this issue—holding a mass meet- ing at the Albert Hall on Tuesday, April 18. Only those who have never bothered to ask themselves what hanging is supposed to be an answer to can seriously doubt the truth of the slogan any longer. It is worth remembering that the murder of a Worthing bank guard, of which three youths were found guilty a few days ago, took place within a few hours of immense pub- licity being given to the hanging of a man who had committed murder in similar circumstances; a better demonstration of the futility of capital punishment as a deterrent would be hard to find.
But to state the problem in these terms is itself futile. Retentionists do not, whatever they may say or even believe, in fact base their desire to retain hanging on a belief that hanging reduces the number of murders. The case for hanging rests on an instinct far deeper in the community, and the individuals who make up the community, than can ever be reached by mere facts. That is why, although the Campaign's organisers may be thought a little naïve to say that 'A packed hall, plus overflow, may turn the scale,' such a demonstration has a real double value. In the first place it serves to keep the subject alive in the public mind; and in the second, it—and its publicity—will help to bring pressure to bear upon the Government, through which alone the present impossible situation may be changed. The Homicide Act has, in the short time that has elapsed since it was passed, proved not merely un- just, absurd and virtually unworkable, but—in the senseless distinctions which it makes between one 'No, they're all Labour people, actually.' killer and another—a return to a kind of barbar- ism that one hoped had been rooted out of the British penal system for ever. The meeting deserves support; not because the Government will bow to its wishes and abolish capital punish- ment, but simply because hanging's no answer, and the more the Government is forced to pre- tend in public that it is, the closer comes the day when it will have to stop pretending for good.
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