The attack on a prison officer by Axel Rudakubana, the killer of the three girls at a dance class in Southport in 2024, has revived calls for a restoration of capital punishment, as many ask why he is serving a 52-year jail term at huge public expense, rather than have been put to death at the time for his heinous crime.
Rudakubana is reported to have thrown boiling water from a kettle over an officer from his cell at Belmarsh high security prison in south-east London. Although at the time he made his murderous attacks on the children, he was 17 and was therefore just under the age when killers could legally be hanged when Britain still retained the death penalty, there have been calls for an exception to be made in his exceptionally awful case.
Only last month, in a similar incident, Hashem Abedi, Jihadi brother of Salman Abedi, the 2017 Manchester Arena suicide bomber, inflicted life changing injuries on three prison officers at HMP Frankland in County Durham when he threw hot cooking oil over them and stabbed them with a home-made knife. Abedi is serving life for helping his brother prepare Britain’s most lethal single Islamist attack, in which 22 young people died while attending an Ariana Grande concert. After the Frankland attack, he too was moved to Belmarsh to serve out his sentence – again at the expense of the taxpayer.
The calls for a return of the rope or some more humane form of capital punishment, such as a lethal injection, resonate strongly within the ranks of Reform, which is currently topping the polls and takes a tough line on crime and punishment.
One Reform MP, Lee Anderson, has called for Rudakubana to be executed despite his youth, while former party leader Richard Tice has demanded that there should at least be a ‘national debate’ on the issue. However, the party’s latest MP, Sarah Pochin, who took Runcorn & Helsby from Labour earlier this month in a sensational by election win, has said that she strongly opposes the death penalty.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer has said that Labour has ‘no plans’ to reintroduce the penalty, while Reform’s founder and current leader Nigel Farage – whose voice may be decisive in the party’s internal law and order debates – says that he too is against capital punishment, but believes that the issue should be freely debated both in parliament and by the public.
As recently as 2010, 74 per cent of people favoured the death penalty in certain cases
Britain suspended hanging in 1965, and finally abolished it in 1969, though there were debates in Westminster up to the 1980s on whether to restore it for particularly sadistic killings, or the murder of children. At the time of abolition, liberal parliamentary opinion was out of step with the public, who strongly supported the retention of the death penalty, and even as recently as 2010, 74 per cent of people still favoured it in polls for some categories of murder.
Lately, however, there has been a sharp decline in support, with only 40 per cent now saying that they back the supreme penalty. A major impetus behind the campaign for abolishing hanging was public revulsion over the cases of Timothy Evans and Derek Bentley, who were both posthumously pardoned after they were hanged for murders that they did not commit, and the 1955 execution of Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged, for shooting her lover at the instigation of a jealous rival.
If there are more cases of callous mass murder such as those committed by Rudakubana and Abedi though, they are bound to lead to renewed demands for a restoration of lethal punishment for lethal crimes, and if Reform wins enough seats at the next election, the hitherto taboo issue will again return to the forefront of debate.
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