Can Britain Bring Back the Death Penalty?
Calls to bring back the death penalty in the UK will reignite tensions over national sovereignty and European influence. Can Britain defy the European Convention on Human Rights and reclaim control over its legislation?
Alexander Shaw
Feb 6, 2025 - 8:54 PM
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Britain leading the way
Britain abolished capital punishment comparatively early, in 1965, but the topic periodically resurfaces in the wake of some violent atrocity. This time it was a murderous attack on a children’s playgroup in which three girls were stabbed to death. Upon receiving the maximum possible sentence of 52 years imprisonment, the perpetrator, Axel Rudakubana smirked ‘I’m glad that they’re dead.’
Journalists and commentators are now chewing the cud over problems of effective deterrence, rehabilitation, prison statistics, and the right to life. But what this self-important discussion always overlooks is that the UK is not permitted to re-instate the death penalty.
It is significant, therefore, that this time the calls for a “national debate” came from the Reform Party’s Rupert Lowe and Richard Tice, with Lee Anderson posting an image of a noose on X with the comment “this is what is required.”
Reform’s leader, Nigel Farage (‘Mr Brexit’), has built a career on exposing the extent to which national sovereignty has been eroded by foreign governance. Thanks to his movement, a growing proportion of British voters are now driven not by any matter of policy but rather by their doubts over leaders’ ability to enact laws at all.
The UK still baulks with indignation at the Conservative government’s £700m failure to deport illegal immigrants to Rwanda - and bristles with aspiration to the ‘can-do’ attitude of President Trump as he succeeds in a similar deportation scheme on the other side of the Atlantic. With 55% in favour of the death penalty, now is the time to strike. With Farage in the fray, any effort to brush the question of ‘can we?’ under the rug of ‘should we?’ will fail.
The obstacle to both capital punishment and the Rwanda plan is the Council of Europe.
What is the Council of Europe?
The UK left the European Union in 2020, so no longer has to answer to the European Court of Justice, the Council of Ministers or the European Parliament.
But it remains a member of the Council of Europe, which it helped establish in 1949. Headquartered in Strasbourg, the Council’s broader membership includes Turkey and, until 2022, Russia. Members must meet the group’s collective standard of democratic freedom and Human rights. Allegations that a state has failed to meet these standards are heard by the European Court of Human Rights.
In 1953, the Council passed the European Convention on Human Rights (abbreviated to ‘ECHR’), which progressively banned the death penalty - decades behind the UK - finally abolishing it completely in 2003.
Britain’s long tradition of civil liberty and freedom under the law is antithetical to Europe’s constructed concept of human rights, which assumes that these rights are the state’s to give in the first place.
There is little political kudos to be gained from membership of an organisation the UK founded in the first place, nor is there any sense that Britain would descend into violent barbarism without it. In short, Britain is among the likeliest to dismiss the ECHR in principle - having both a historical place to run to and a sense of greater possibility under leaders prepared to turn their back on the very institutions that the European neighbours aspire to.
Apologists for the ECHR’s interventions are left to tread an increasingly tricky line of persuading the British to kow-tow to a European court for diplomacy’s sake while European leaders deplore the Brexit movement, throw migrants at the UK and make scarcely veiled economic threats at London, whose political future hangs in the Atlantic balance.
Ironically, it is the effort to codify human rights which directs public discussion to the extreme of capital punishment when a myriad of much more practical, productive and, arguably, virtuous solutions could otherwise be on the table.
Once the obstacle of human rights is removed, someone like Axel Rudakubana could become a slave asset to a penal system in which he would become both simple to manage and easy to dispose of.
It shouldn’t be assumed that the 32% of Brits who are still anti capital punishment are motivated by humanitarian concern for the convicted.
Sovereignty On Trial
It was in June 2022, that the European Court of Human Rights issued its ruling blocking the deportation of illegal immigrants to Rwanda due to a perceived risk that they could be subjected to inhumane treatment upon arrival. Labour’s scrapping of the policy after it had already proven unenforcible smacked more of impotence than magnanimity. The smell of blood is in the water.
Meanwhile, Farage’s reputation in Washington now depends on living up to his reputation as a political disruptor.
The essence of Faragian politics is the use of simple, emotive, objectives as a vehicle to remove complex obstacles and broaden the options available to legislators. 55% currently support the death penalty and its no mere coincidence that Reform intersects with this lobby almost entirely. If Farage can use this mandate to paint the government into a corner of defending a foreign judicial interest against its own country, then the issue of capital punishment will quickly be forgotten.
And if Britain can find a way of surrendering to the status quo of its own humanity, rather than the coercion of a foreign court, it's likely that both sides of the death penalty debate will find great satisfaction.
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Alexander Shaw
Journalist