'Shock poll reveals half of Britons want to see the death penalty reinstated!' shouted the headline, amidst a flurry of excitement that, due to an e-petition submitted to the 'Number10.gov.uk' website, the subject of capital punishment may be a forced issue for debate in the House of Commons (the rule being that petitions with over 100,000 signatures automatically qualify for such an honour).
Reading this, I was curious. Curious to see just what exactly over 100,000 people had signed up for. Surely not simply an hysterical 'Bring bak the death penulty!' Surely this petition was carefully thought-out, providing a persuasive and intelligent argument as to why we should travel back in time to the black-and-white era and reinstate the gallows, only this time updating it a bit by sticking a few chavs on the end of the noose?
Alas, on visiting 'Number10.gov.uk' I couldn't find the petition everybody was referring to. But I did find a host of other ones, and would suggest to anybody needing a little smile that they go and take a look at them all. My current favourites are 'Save Our Lollipop People' (that one conjured up a fantastic image of people with heads shaped like Chupa-Chups dangling off the edge of a cliff) and 'Stop Assuming that Everyone Loves Bloody Cycling and Build Some Decent Roads Instead' (current number of signatories = one). I also liked 'No Drinking and Driving' - maybe I'm wrong, but isn't there already a law preventing this? Oh, there are so many pesky laws these days, it's hard to keep up with them all.
The newspapers have presented the 'death penalty e-petition' argument as though there actually might be a chance of it coming back. Because lots of people who know how to use the internet thingy have signed a petition! A petition from which no actual detail can be gleaned. What 'death penalty' are we referring to here? Hanging? Lethal injection? Getting kitted out in a Lady Gaga-style meat dress and given a quick shove off the end of Brighton Pier, after which you're left to the mercy of a menacing group of hammerhead sharks specially shipped in from Costa Rica?
I once read an article about Albert Pierrepoint, England's "last executioner", who is reported to have said that nobody who wanted to 'bring back the death penalty' could ever agree on where to draw the line. It's an interesting question to ask anyone who might have signed that petition seemingly without having given any thought to how 'bringing back the death penalty' might actually be carried out. I personally haven't posed that question to anybody who hasn't stopped slightly in their tracks.
But essentially I don't think we need fear anything from the terrifying petition-signers that pervade the virtual corridors of 'Number10.gov.uk'. Mainly because of all the bleak greyness surrounding how it would be implemented and because I'm generally confident that for all its faults, we don't live in a nasty reactionary country willing to bring something back that has never worked in the first place, just to take a feeble potshot at something resembling 'justice'.
But also because, in today's Mail on Sunday, even Richard Littlejohn uttered the immortal words "For the record, I wouldn't bring it back".
(Though I accept that he might not have understood the petition fully).
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