TOO MUCH OF A GOOD THING?

The window display in a referendum shop, Scotland 

Referendums – referenda? – seem to be all the rage at the moment.  I am writing this in Scotland where the nationalists, far from accepting the 2014 choice by Scots to stay in the UK, are pressing for another vote. Presumably, if they get and lose that one, they will press for another – and another – until they get the result they want, when they will suddenly lose enthusiasm for the concept of asking people their opinion. 

A similar problem exists with the European Union which we voted on a couple of years ago.  Several people are now suggesting a second referendum on the subject with the hope of reversing the first vote.  The trouble with that idea would be that you would have to offer people not two choices but three – stay in, leave with a negotiated settlement the like of which the government has proposed, or crash out without paying a penny and saving some £40 billion pounds in the process.  Plenty of people favour the last option and would not accept the result of a vote which did not offer it.  The nightmare scenario would then be, say, 45% for staying in, 30% for leaving with a settlement and 25% for crashing out.  This is quite possible and would leave a majority wanting to leave - but not agreeing how – with the biggest single vote for staying in.  No politician would ever allow that scenario to arise and leaving one of the three options out would effectively disenfranchise a large part of the electorate so a second referendum is, I would have thought, very unlikely to happen.

In fact, to be precise, it would be a third referendum on Europe, not a second.  I am old enough to have voted in both the first and second ones, choosing to stay on both occasions, being on the winning side (comfortably) in the first and the losing side (narrowly) in the second. The original referendum was in 1975, the very first time the British people had encountered the phenomenon of voting on a single issue.  It seemed quite jolly at the time and, even if the second vote was marred by immigration scares and outright racism, it did at least get people to exercise their franchise in larger numbers than they had ever done before.

But you can have too much of a good thing.  Voting is about decision making not about detail: him or her for office; this party or that; in or out of Europe, proportional representation or first past the post. Then you leave the detail to the politicians, which is what they are paid for after all. Maybe we can have another either/or vote when the dust has settled and we can see if breaking with the EU has worked and we remain prosperous and comfortable. If it leads to huge queues of lorries on the M2, vegetables rotting in the fields and the NHS in even greater trouble because of a lack of workers, we might want to go cap in hand to ask if we can come back, please. Otherwise, we need to accept the first vote and get on with the process.

The elephant in the voting booth when it comes to allowing the people to decide, of course, is capital punishment.  The accepted wisdom is that, if you allowed the people to decide, they would vote for its restoration and bring back hanging.  Yet there is not the slightest possibility of that actually happening.

Why not? Not only have we managed to create a relatively safe society without resorting to executing criminals but we have lost the means and the will to use the death penalty.  The USA still has it and still executes people in certain states. Yet it is one of the most violent countries in the world with a far higher murder rate than that of any state which does not execute people.  The Second Amendment, which allows the carrying of weapons, leads to their use when minor confrontations turn deadly and to hideous unstoppable massacres of the innocent by nutcases whose lives have gone wrong. 

In contrast the UK, in or out of Europe, is a relatively peaceful place.  There are acid attacks and knife crimes but we trust the police to get on top of these problems and maintain some sort of law and order.  There is no evidence that restoring the death penalty would effectively deter crimes of this sort.

And what if we did bring it back?  We would need lawyers, judges and doctors to argue for and implement it and there is no sign that they have any enthusiasm for bringing back state killing.  How would it be done anyway? There are no trained hangmen around; lethal injection would almost certainly be challenged successfully in the courts as cruel and unusual punishment; the electric chair is obsolete. Firing squads? The heart sinks at the thought of getting enthusiastic amateur volunteer killers to shoot the condemned. 

The great majority of lawyers would refuse to argue in favour of the death penalty, judges would flinch at the thought of donning that black cap and not many doctors would want to become involved in the process. Any professionals who facilitated capital punishment would become known as death-mongers and find that invitations to fashionable cocktail and dinner parties rapidly dried up.  While they lost hope of professional advancement and acceptance, there would be armies of volunteers who would oppose efforts to use capital punishment and make life a misery for those who tried to enforce it.  Never underestimate the power of peer pressure.  The chattering classes will not support the death penalty so it is not coming back – ever.

Get over it, death penalty restorers.  It is a hopeless cause and, while there may be enthusiasm amongst the general public for its return, the people who would have to put it into practice are simply not there. Restoring the death penalty is one option that will never be put to the people in a referendum.  Thank God.

Edwin Lerner.  (My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com)