Killing With Kindness

In the past couple of days, visitors and readers of ConservativeHome have debated whether the death penalty should be reintroduced in Britain.

Today, in a comment article on ConservativeHome, David T Breaker argued that the death penalty was wrong. In the comments, the Conservative MP for North Warwickshire and Bedworth, Dan Byles, agreed, saying that he believed ‘the power to take the lives of its citizens is too awesome a power to trust to the State’.

This remark on capital punishment is particularly interesting in light of the speech he made back in March, duly recorded by Hansard, in which Mr Byles made the following points:

I believe that the House is broadly united, with the possible exception of Mr Winnick, in believing that in the case of Libya, events had reached a stage where committing our military to enforcing the UN resolution is absolutely the right thing to do.

The spectre of Iraq should not prevent us from doing what we believe is right and is ultimately in our national interests…

It is with some regret that I will be voting for the motion, because committing military forces to action anywhere in the world is regrettable. It will lead to dead soldiers, if not British, then Libyan; we must not forget that whichever side wins, there are casualties on the other side.

What we understand by all this is that Mr Byles is perfectly in favour of the State using the ‘awesome power’ of taking life to kill Libyan soldiers and civilians, which is the logical and real consequence of his support for military action in Libya – but he is against the execution of convicted murderers, tried by a jury of their peers (with unanimous verdicts) under an open legal system, with a right to defence and fair trial.

Dan Byles MP is therefore prepared to protect Libyan civilians by dropping bombs on Gaddafi, but if innocent civilians are killed by mistake (and they have been and will be), it is deemed ‘regrettable’ but, in his eyes, acceptable. But he will not allow the hanging of British murderers for their crimes and to protect us.

The Bankruptcy Of Harm Reduction

Despite all else that is going on in the world, we once again return to the important issue of illegal drugs, with news that Louise Mensch (formerly Bagshawe) had ‘probably’ taken drugs while working for record company EMI – though rather tellingly she just can’t quite remember.

We were also graced with an article, currently behind the pay-wall of yesterday’s Times newspaper, by Anushka Asthana (who she?) claiming:

The bankruptcy of prohibition is becoming ever more apparent as it fails to keep up with the plethora of ‘legal highs’. As one is banned, ten more emerge. There will be no need to go to dark alleys in Brixton soon: the internet will offer people everything they want. Some form of legalisation – in which users are no longer criminalised but the market is regulated – is inevitable for some substances. So we might as well start thinking about how to do it now.

It doesn’t really seem to matter how many times you point out to the likes of Ms Asthana and fellow travellers that Britain has no such manner of prohibition, they just won’t listen. This is because they are attempting to draw comparison between the perfectly winnable battle (if we were to actually fight it) against drugs in Britain with actual prohibition of alcohol in the United States of the 1920s, which was doomed to failure before it even began.

The divide lies between those of us who wish to see the current laws strengthened and enforced, and those who believe users are somehow able to take these drugs more safely. They call it ‘harm reduction’, though it is anything but. Furthermore, Ms Asthana casually repeats that old lie which claims drug users are criminalised by the law, where in fact it is users who criminalise themselves by taking their poison in the first place.

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Private Conversations Among Elites

Writing in the Telegraph, Peter Oborne seeks to develop the argument that, in the wake of the phone hacking scandal, we are moving into a ‘post-Murdoch age’ where British politics may develop genuine substance.

In his article, Oborne suggests that Blair and New Labour reinterpreted the British political tradition as a private conversation among elite groups, of which the most important in Blair’s eyes was Rupert Murdoch’s corporate empire. In that he is not wrong. Yet, says Oborne:

It is this system of government that has been exposed in all of its barbarism and moral horror over the past few weeks. As the Westminster season mercifully draws towards a close, it is extremely important to ponder what comes next – for I am certain that there is a wonderful opportunity here to embark upon a new political era, and a new way of doing things.

Sadly, this fantasy is unlikely to become reality in the foreseeable future. No such real exposure has been given to the ‘private conversations among elite groups’ which Oborne describes in his piece, because the re-emergence of phone hacking was primarily a means by the liberal media to stop News Corp’s BSkyB bid.

While the exposure of Murdoch’s corporate meetings with George Osborne and David Cameron have again exposed Cameron as politically inept (if we needed any further proof), it has not drawn a line under similar meetings occurring in future.

Peter Hitchens used a chapter in his book The Broken Compass (recently re-released as The Cameron Delusion) to describe the relationship between journalist and politician, which is at times very close indeed – and this will always be so. But, as Mr Hitchens more recently described, the relationship between the press and politicians should be identical to that between a dog and a lamp post. The problem arises when, as has recently been more apparent, the press and politicians are of one mind.

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The Taxpayers’ Alliance

I missed yesterday’s announcement that former Telegraph and ConHome writer, Jonathan Isaby had been appointed Political Director of the Taxpayers’ Alliance.

The Conservative party and the Taxpayers’ Alliance have always had a very close relationship. The appointment of Isaby as Political Director, apparently responsible for ‘building links with Ministers, MPs and MEPs’, means the partnership will become cosier still.

This appointment brings to mind an occasion in 2006 when I visited Conservative Central Office at its former residence in Victoria Street. During the meeting, our group were informed by Mark Clarke, who was then the pompous Chairman of Conservative Future, and Ian Oakley, at the time a Conservative candidate in Watford, that the newly formed Taxpayers’ Alliance were simply a front organisation set up by the Tories to attack Labour on tax.

The ‘brilliant idea’, so we were told, was to create a separate organisation that could attack Blair and Brown on economic issues, meaning the Labour party, BBC and print media couldn’t just dismiss the complaints as being irrelevant because they had come from the Conservatives.

I even recall mention of how the organisation was to be funded by existing donors to the Tory party and indirectly, the Conservative party itself. At the time I wrote a blog entry on my website making note of a few of these remarks on the TPA, and criticised Mark Clarke and Ian Oakley for being slimy and insincere. Not long afterwards Clarke contacted me by email to ask that I withdraw the article, not, so he said, due to the personal criticism, but for revealing matters about the workings of the TPA at a private meeting in CCHQ. Naturally I refused, and that was the end of the matter as far as I saw it. Furthermore, in subsequent years my observations on the disgraceful Ian Oakley were rather vindicated by events.

Thus, from its inception, the Taxpayers’ Alliance existed as a Conservative sanctioned group used to indirectly assault the Labour administration over their economic incompetence, high tax policies and runaway spending habits. Of course, now that Labour are no longer in office and the Tories (and Lib Dims) have replaced them, the situation has somewhat changed.

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