English Actually by Bob Yareham

Author:Bob Yareham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Obrapropia, S. L.
Published: 2018-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

The Beastly Sixties

The capital punishment debate is a highly sensitive one where heart and mind battle in the No Man’s Land of ethical doubt before finally reaching the inevitable conclusion that the death penalty doesn’t work as a deterrent and the State should not degrade itself by imitating the crimes of the wrongdoers.

Nevertheless, most of us could think of a wide range of acquaintances, relatives and perfect strangers who we would love to see swinging from the gallows at a bleak crossroads and good riddance.

Capital Punishment comes from the Latin ‘capitalis,’ meaning ‘head,’ which is the most appropriate and easiest part of the body to remove in order to achieve the ultimate objective of any death sentence.

Possibly capital punishment would be more popular if it didn’t have such a bleak history, and wasn’t so clearly associated with totalitarianism and an unjust society. In other words, it’s had bad PR.

In 1699 the Shoplifting Act made it a capital offence to steal goods valued at more than five shillings from a shop. While I can understand the contented glow that this must have produced among shopkeepers the length and breadth of the land, most of you would I’m sure admit to having ‘borrowed’ goods valued at that price at some time.

In 1723 the number of capital crimes suddenly soared from 30 to 150, largely to protect the estates of the nobility, and in 1810 we peaked at 222, and were in serious danger of eliminating crime altogether.

Of course there were excesses; in 1782 a 14 year old girl was hanged for being in the company of gypsies, and in 1816, four boys aged between 9 and 13 were hanged in London for begging.

By 1835 the tide was beginning to turn as crimes such as letter stealing and sacrilege ceased to be capital, and we were once again on the slippery slope towards tolerance.

Worse was to come; in 1861 the list of capital crimes was reduced to a pathetically feeble four: treason, piracy, mutiny and murder; which explains why so many of us blame the sixties for most of the evils of today.

Michael Barrett would have been quietly forgotten had he not squeezed into the Guinness Book of Records as the last man to be publicly hanged in Britain on May 26 th 1868 (the sixties again!) And indeed, who can remember the one who came after him?

In 1908, in an act of pernicious ageism that would have liberals frothing at the mouth today, hanging was restricted to those of 16 years and over, and despite the proven genetic basis of criminality, in 1931 pro-abolitionists guaranteed the survival of future generations of criminals by prohibiting the hanging of pregnant women, promoting wanton promiscuity at the same time.

1948 was the beginning of the end; the House of Commons, a place riddled with candidates for the long drop (introduced by hangman William Marwood in 1875) suspended capital punishment for 5 years, although fortunately

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