Would You Give Them The Rope?

The argument for it is not stupid

There is a petition before Parliament again, and the polling has shifted. Roughly half the country now supports capital punishment for some crimes, and among younger voters the figure is higher than among their grandparents.

Let us not pretend the people signing it are fools. When a man murders children, "life" that isn't life feels like an insult. Families are told a sentence is the end of it and then read about appeals for twenty years. The instinct that some acts forfeit the right to walk the earth is not barbarism. It is one of the oldest moral intuitions there is, and sneering at it is why so many people have stopped listening to the people who sneer.

So this article does not argue that the worst among us deserve better than they get.

It asks a different question, and it is the only one that matters.

Who decides?

The death penalty is not really a question about murderers. It is a question about the state.

To bring it back is to hand a government the power to kill a citizen, deliberately, in cold blood, with no way of undoing it afterwards. Not the power to punish — we already give them that. The power to make a mistake that cannot be corrected.

So before you answer, look at who you would be handing it to.

This is a state that took seventeen years to admit it had jailed an innocent man for a rape he did not commit, and then dragged its feet even after the DNA came back. A state that prosecuted hundreds of postmasters for stealing money that never went missing, and kept prosecuting while it knew the computer was wrong. A state whose police can find officers to knock on a door about a tweet but not to attend a burglary. A state that refused a man asylum three times and then left him walking around Greater Manchester with an axe.

None of those failures were malicious. That is exactly the point. They were ordinary institutional failure — confident, procedural, sincere, and wrong.

Now imagine that same machinery with a gallows attached.

We have already done this

Britain does not need to speculate about what happens when a confident state gets it wrong, because we have the receipt.

In 1950 we hanged Timothy Evans for a murder committed by the man living downstairs. It took sixteen years and a royal pardon to admit it. He was not the only one. The Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four, Stefan Kiszko — every one of them convicted by the same courts, the same police, the same confident procedures that would have been signing the death warrants.

The Birmingham Six served sixteen years before they walked free. Under a death penalty they would not have walked anywhere. They would have been corrected posthumously, with an apology to a headstone.

That is not a hypothetical objection. It is our own recent history, and the only reason those names are known as victims rather than as executed murderers is that we had stopped hanging people by the time they were convicted.

Watch the list grow

Here is the part that ought to give even the keenest supporter pause.

The petition currently before Parliament does not ask for the death penalty for murder. It asks for it for treason, rape, murder, terrorism and espionage.

Read that list again. It has already grown, and not a single line of legislation has been drafted yet.

That is how this always goes. It begins with the child killer everybody agrees about. Then it is the terrorist. Then treason — and who decides what treason is? A government defines it, and governments have been known to find the word useful when they are under pressure. Espionage — decided by whom, on what evidence, heard in which court?

Ask yourself honestly: do you want the people currently running this country drawing up the list of offences that carry death? The same people whose values, on almost every other question, you have concluded do not match your own?

You cannot spend a decade arguing that the state is out of touch with ordinary people and then hand that same state the ultimate sanction on the assumption it will apply it exactly as you would.

The only safe way to decide

None of which means the question should be closed. It plainly isn't closed — half the country wants it discussed, and a Parliament that voted this down heavily in 1994 does not reflect the country as it now is. Refusing to debate it is what got us here.

But a decision this size cannot be made the way we make ordinary decisions.

If it goes through Parliament in the normal way, it goes through on a whipped vote, in a bad week, after a terrible crime, by a majority that may be tiny and a government that may be desperate. And what one Parliament passes, the next can widen. Add an offence here, lower a threshold there. No lock, because there is never a lock.

The power to end a citizen's life should not be something a government can be granted by four hundred people on a Tuesday evening. If the British people want it, the British people should have to say so directly, in a referendum, with the exact list of offences printed on the ballot paper — and with any future addition to that list requiring the same permission all over again.

That is not a delaying tactic. It is the difference between a country that has chosen something and a country that has had something done to it.

Put it to the country, or not at all. No government should acquire the power of execution by ordinary legislation. A binding referendum, with the offences named on the paper, and any later addition to that list requiring a fresh vote of the people.

Fix the convictions first. Before anyone discusses irreversible punishment, deal with the reversible failures — a Criminal Cases Review Commission with teeth, proper disclosure obligations on police and prosecutors, and compensation that doesn't have to be fought for. A state that cannot reliably identify the innocent has not earned the right to kill the guilty.

Make them show their working. If Parliament debates this, require the Ministry of Justice to publish how many convictions for the proposed offences have been overturned in the last fifty years. Not an estimate. The number. Then let the country decide with that figure in front of it.

We would rather be governed by a country that decided this for itself and got it wrong than by a state that decided it for us and got it right. That is not squeamishness. It is the whole argument for self-government, and it applies most strongly at exactly the moment the stakes are highest.

Reintroduce the death penalty for Treason, Rape, Murder, Terrorism & Espionage — petition before Parliament — https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/760749 Poll reveals majority of Britons want to reinstate the death penalty, The Justice Gap (More in Common polling) — https://www.thejusticegap.com/poll-reveals-majority-of-britons-want-to-reinstate-the-death-penalty/ Do Britons support the return of corporal and capital punishment?, YouGov — https://yougov.com/en-gb/articles/53343-do-britons-support-the-return-of-corporal-and-capital-punishment Public opinion on the death penalty, on the 1994 Commons vote — https://pollingreport.uk/articles/public-opinion-on-the-death-penalty/ Executing justice: should we reintroduce the death penalty in the UK?, University of London Laws Blog — https://lawsblog.london.ac.uk/2026/06/11/executing-justice-should-we-reintroduce-the-death-penalty-in-the-uk/