The Light’s on at Signpost

by George MacDonald Fraser

  The failure of successive governments to deal with crime, their surrender to liberal pressure and flat refusal to do anything practical, is in itself the greatest crime of all. When any particularly appalling crime is committed—the murder of a child, usually—there is an immediate pious wail from the Left and an endless waffling of platitudes featuring the word “unacceptable”, an earnest debate about the causes of crime, a hypocritical lip-service to “doing something”, a laying of flowers and weeping for the cameras, a great shaking of fat heads on Question Time, perhaps a rushing through Parliament of cosmetic and totally useless measures to “crack down” which everyone, including the police and judiciary, regard with contempt, and a stern admonition from Downing Street that it is the responsibility of us all, because government can’t tackle the problem on its own, and it is up to the public, etc., etc.—and it is all meaningless, and we know it, but it beats the hell out of doing anything. Government, of either party, talks about the public’s responsibility while abdicating its own with a cowardice matched only by its callousness, and, failing to protect the public, refuses the public the right to defend themselves.

  Ask the man or woman in the street what should be done about this disgraceful state of affairs, and they’ll tell you, in simple terms which no politician would have the nerve to use, much less act upon. Easier by far to pontificate fatuously while the next victim is raped and strangled…and then the great mockery of inactivity and pretended concern can be gone through again.

  We could discuss the failure to deal with crime at length, but there’s no profit in that; better to say what should be done about it, and I am confident that what follows would command the support of a majority of Britons, if it were ever put to them in a referendum, which of course it never will be.

  First, it is plain that no country can call itself civilised which does not have the death penalty for murder. That is not to say that it must be inflicted in every case; far from it. But it must be there. Since it was abolished, criminal killing and violent crime have rocketed, and only a fool or a liar would deny the obvious truth: the death penalty is a deterrent, and those abolitionists who deny it are lying. They’ve got to lie. To admit the truth that they know in their hearts, that the gallows deters, but that they still want none of it, would be to put themselves in the morally impossible position of saying that they would rather the innocent died than the guilty. So they must persist in their falsehood, flying blindly in the face of common sense, honesty, and human experience since time began.

  What, in all our literature, in our very sense of being, is the ultimate sanction? Death. Not life imprisonment (which term is a lie also), not probation, not stern words from the bench, not even prison visits from the late Lord Longford, but death. (I am reminded of what a Glasgow police sergeant told me about his arrest of a villain: “He didn’t say don’t put me in jail, he didn’t say don’t send me to the psychiatrist, he said don’t hit me, mister. So I hit him—blooter!” No doubt Lord Macpherson would say that this was institutional violence. The point is that the policeman knew what worked.)

  Deterrence is not the only reason for capital punishment. Simple justice is another, equally strong. There is a human instinct that one who kills deliberately and unlawfully has forfeited the right to live. Not because anything less would leave him able to kill again, but because it is just and proper that he should die. There have, incidentally, been some seventy cases, since abolition, of murderers killing a second time after release, and even the most fervent abolitionist cannot deny that the death penalty, if applied, would have saved many innocent lives. (So would a true life sentence.) The abolitionist has no answer to this except the outworn claptrap about the sanctity of human life (the murderer’s life, never mind the victim’s), and the parrot-cry that the state has no right to end a human existence, no Christian conscience can condone it, and so on.

  Therein lies the nub: conscience—of which, no doubt, the abolitionist is proud. The appalling fact is that he puts his conscience above the life of the victim. It is not too much to say that as long as he can go to bed thinking: “Thank God I hold the right, enlightened view on capital punishment, and live in a country where it doesn’t exist”, he couldn’t care less how many children and old folk are butchered. They are expendable, but his conscience isn’t. What it is to have a conscience, eh? To be able to live with the knowledge of the abominable tortures inflicted on children by Hindley and Brady, and yet maintain that the lives of those two bestial murderers must remain inviolate. Liberals have achieved abolition, and are proud of it, and the devil with those victims they have condemned to death as a result.

  The stark truth, of course, is that they have not abolished the death penalty at all. They have merely transferred it from the guilty to the innocent—and incidentally ensured that many more violent deaths occur. They can live with that, apparently, shielding those ragged shreds of conscience behind the lie that the death penalty would have no effect on the murder rate. Well, we know of seventy cases where it would, and that is one hard fact that not all the twisting of truth and careful selection of statistics can explain away.

  It can be objected, very properly, that the trouble with the death penalty is that you may execute the wrong man, and many abolitionists try to link this with the false pretence that people like me want every murderer to hang. Certainly not, and I remind them that before abolition only a minority of murderers were executed. My contention is that the death sentence should be applied only when the guilt of the accused is beyond doubt—not what is called reasonable doubt, but any doubt at all. There are such open and shut cases. Where a shadow of doubt attends a conviction, the sentence should be life imprisonment—meaning just that, not release after nine years. (It is a sign of the law’s guilty conscience that it has to pretend that a few years in jail is “life”. Why the silly and unnecessary lie, which only brings the law’s integrity and intelligence into disrepute, and reflects no credit on those who administer it without protest?)

  What is necessary is simply that the death penalty should exist, a permanent deterrent, and that would certainly be enough at least to give pause to the armed robber, the violent thug, and (dare one suggest it?) the domestic killer who pleads loss of control, provocation, drink, drugs, an abused childhood, and any other excuse that comes to mind. Thanks to the reformers, we are now used to the wife who murders her husband in his sleep, and the husband who bludgeons or stabs his wife to death—and both will plead that the dead spouse had made life hell for them, and all too often walk free with a sympathetic benediction from the idiot on the bench. It seems not to occur to anyone that they heard only one side of the case; that the dead victim, reviled from the witness box (and no doubt often deserving of vilification), has had no chance to put a case, being dead.

  We are assured that such murders, usually committed in blind passion, would not be deterred by the death penalty, that penalties don’t cross the minds of such killers. No? Could that be because the penalties don’t exist—not real penalties to stay a murderous hand even in blind rage. Is it ridiculous to suggest that the knowledge, at the back of every mind, that the gallows is there, the ultimate sanction, might not prevent many domestic quarrels from becoming fatal ones?

  No one would suggest for a moment that the deranged mother should face the death penalty for murdering her child in a frenzy of desperation—but again, is it not possible that even a deranged mother, knowing that she lived in a state that executed murderers, might out of that awful knowledge be moved to hold her hand? And if I am thought to be lacking in compassion and understanding even to cite such a case, let me point out that I do so out of concern not for the mother but for the infant victim.

  Surely even liberals are not too obtuse to have learned the age-old lesson that when it comes to restraining the criminal, or imposing discipline (whether on the mob or in the classroom), a threat is sufficient nine times out of ten if it is understood that it is not an empty one. At present all the tough talk of
“cracking down” and “three strikes and out” is seen for what it is: empty sound, and the criminal simply laughs at the fatuous politician and goes his lawless way in the sure knowledge that nothing can possibly happen to him except a short spell of what Solzhenitsyn called warm cells and white bread. With the enlightened lobby getting their bowels in an uproar about the prisoner’s human rights, too.

  But if the brute knows, as he puts the boot into the old lady’s face, that he will be flogged extremely painfully, he will think twice; he will be less liable to throw people into rivers and laugh as they drown if he knows that his neck will be broken by way of retribution.

  That paragraph should be enough to convince anyone of liberal tendencies that I am a vengeful sadist. I’m not, but if I were, would it matter if it saved an old lady from being battered to death, or a young life from being snuffed out by a true sadist?

  There are many emotional arguments against the death penalty—the horror of execution, the cold-blooded extinction of life, the ghastly ritual of trapdoor and noose. Yes, it’s horrible. It was equally horrible when the victim died. I have been asked, could I bear to carry out an execution. Yes, without hesitation. I was trained to kill, like my whole generation, and for the life of me I fail to understand how the liberal conscience can live with killing in war (blowing children to pieces in Kosovo, for example) but insist on the right to life of the Hindleys and Bradys and similar vermin.

  The restoration of corporal punishment is also long overdue. If there is a deterrent to match the rope, it is the cat, as many old lags will testify. The birch should also be reintroduced for juvenile offenders. While we had it in the Isle of Man, this was a safe place; my teenage daughter and her friends could hitchhike home from dances in the middle of the night without fear; it was common to leave doors, and certainly cars, unlocked.

  Then, under pressure from Westminster, birching was abolished, and girls no longer hitchhike home. The police, whose arrival at the scene of rowdyism used to send the offenders fleeing, now find the hooligans waiting for them. Violence has increased, assault is not uncommon, and murders have taken place in an island where unlawful killing used to be something that had happened in the distant past.

  What a triumph for enlightened thought. What a vindication of the noble lord who contended that the permissive society is a civilised society. It probably seems so in the agreeable surroundings of High Table, or the Lords’ dining room, with the civilised ones comfortably insulated by port and brandy and the certainty that no criminals are likely to break in and assault them. The view from the pavement, where the pensioner is having his face stamped on, is rather different.

  It is worth mentioning that in the years I lived on Man before we were forced to abandon the birch, there was only one instance of an actual birching taking place, on a young thug who had used a broken glass on someone’s face. Years later, when he committed another offence, a leading liberal newspaper in Britain crowed triumphantly that his birching had proved no deterrent. What they omitted to report, with typical dishonesty, was that the new offence had not been committed in the Isle of Man. Indeed, the culprit had taken care never to visit the island again.

  Noose, cat, birch—horrible things, indeed, but less horrible than the murders, maimings, rapes, tortures, and uncountable lesser offences they would undoubtedly prevent. But that cannot be admitted; indeed, the very thought must be suppressed, and in this the government and its enlightened supporters are ably abetted by much of the media, especially the BBC. I do not for a moment believe that the grieving parents of a murdered child, on whom television intrudes with such ghoulish delight, have never expressed a wish to see the death penalty restored—and yet, mirabile dictu, their wish has never been reported in any news bulletin that I have seen. And we need not ask how long a senior policeman would last in his job if he had the temerity to call for capital punishment.

  Suppression of opinion in the name of political correctness is, of course, absolutely necessary; censor a widely held view, and people will think it is not widely held at all. It is a lesson that Dr Goebbels and the Soviet commissars knew by heart, and how they would have admired the technique of the BBC anchorman who, on encountering a death penalty advocate, cut him off abruptly with the words: “Oh, we don’t want to hear from you!”

  No, indeed. Muzzle the majority and the majority will begin to doubt that it is a majority.

  It will be argued, naturally, that the opinion of the majority is irrelevant. It may not be stated quite so bluntly, except by people like the politician quoted earlier, who believe, in his felicitous phrase, that grass-roots opinion is “a negation of political leadership”. So there.

  I am straying, sensibly you will agree, from my main thesis on the death penalty, but it is so patently right, and so widely supported, that I can leave it and touch for a moment on our penal system. It is my belief, borne of experience, that the best correctional policy is to make prisons unpleasant places to which criminals will be in no haste to return. I remember the military jails of my youth and, recalling the salutary effect they had on their unfortunate inmates, cannot suppress the thought that their discipline might with advantage be imposed on criminals today. They wouldn’t know what had hit them, and they wouldn’t like it. This is the psychological approach, you understand. Even less would they like the restoration of hard labour, prison uniform, and spartan living, with only limited recreation for those who had earned it.

  Those foolish enough to break their way on to the roof and demonstrate by hurling down slates…no, I am not going to advocate shooting them down, but simply that for every day they spend on the roof voluntarily, they should spend one compulsorily, without benefit of nourishment. It’s a splendid, simple, politically incorrect old rule: behave, and do as you’re told, or you don’t eat. Now that does work, believe me.

  Alas, none of these fine things will happen. The crime wave will continue to swell, the innocent will die and suffer, and our alleged leaders will wring their hands and talk about “addressing the problem” and monitoring everything in sight and tackling “root causes” such as poverty and disadvantage and lack of opportunity and social injustice and sunspots—everything, in fact, except human wickedness, greed, and cruelty, which are the most common causes, far and away.

  The great and good, especially those who by their progressive policies have brought about the ruin of our education system, will probably not care to admit that a major root cause of crime is the breakdown of discipline in schools. Political correctness cannot face the glaring truth that a child who has no sanctions to fear, and therefore no restraints on his behaviour, is far more likely to grow into a man who respects no law, than the child who is properly disciplined—which means, on occasion, punished. But even mention of punishment will draw squeals of liberal indignation about “child abuse”—a truly weasel attempt to confuse disciplining a naughty child with paedophile activity. But what am I saying? Horror of horrors, I have used the word “naughty”, which has been banned in case it upsets some little darling whose record of street crime and classroom assaults would scarify Al Capone.

  We are told, repeatedly, that violence is no answer to the problem. This is nonsense. With children who attack teachers, bully and rob and enjoy using violence on their fellows, violence is the only answer. But rather than face the truth, government and our education pundits insist on suspensions, and expulsions, and special classes for disruptive pupils, with social workers and psychiatrists speculating aimlessly on the reasons for playground mayhem and vandalism and the culture of disobedience.

  Well, we know what their conclusions will be, and no doubt poverty and broken homes and single-parent upbringing and child abuse can have something to do with it. Certainly the permissive society culture which promotes easy divorce and pays lip-service to family values while undermining them, makes for the kind of home which is a breeding-ground for juvenile delinquency. Government ministers have the impudence to prate about the need for proper behaviour
to be instilled in the home, and go out of their way to make it impossible by prosecuting parents if they punish their children.

  This rank hypocrisy extends to the schools, where the full rigour of the law is employed against a teacher who is alleged to have slapped a child threatening her with assault. Having denied the teacher the means of imposing discipline, government can only make pious noises when asked, what is the teacher to do? Punishment aside, is she not entitled to self-defence? Not in Cool Britannia, she isn’t.

  So we have suspension and expulsion, and the denial to children of a decent education. Even the worst behaved are still entitled to schooling, but the present banning of discipline (for that is what it is) ensures that most of them will leave school semi-literate and ripe for mischief and, eventually, crime. They have been taught that society is a soft mark, and that however they misbehave or offend there will be no real penalty.

  The most effective penalty is corporal punishment, and before the p.c. brigade start accusing me of advocating the torture chamber for errant toddlers, let me say that as child and parent corporal punishment played little part in my life. My bottom was painfully smacked in infancy by my father, but I loved and respected him no whit the less; I was caned once (in England, two cuts, for reading the Wizard during a French lesson), and belted three or four times, usually for throwing knives (in Scotland, where the tawse was the instrument of punishment).

  I will not claim blimpishly that it did me good or made a man of me. It didn’t; it wasn’t meant to. But my father’s smacks discouraged bad behaviour, I was never detected reading the Wizard in class again, and I learned to practise my knife artistry outside school. The beatings were not severe; they were rather a reminder of the disciplinary machine that lay behind, a deterrent that exists no longer. Admittedly, sheer moral force was the main disciplinary instrument of society between the wars (a phenomenon impossible to explain today), but fear of physical punishment went hand in hand with it, and together they worked remarkably.