AND ANOTHER THING
The sanctity of human life is everywhere undermined. It's time to bring back the death penalty
PAUL JOHNSON
Charles Moore drew our attention, in an article The Spectator published last month, to the many ways in which life in Britain has improved since the Conserva- tives took office in 1979. I agree with all the points he made. The material improvement in life over the past 16 years had been enor- mous, and it is pretty widely (though not universally) shared. Now let me turn to the darker side of the picture, the moral deteri- oration in life since 1979, which in some ways has material implications too.
In my view, the most ominous decline has been in the respect which we hold for human life. I do not refer merely to the abortion abattoirs, which have been even busier and more profitable under the Tories than under their Labour predeces- sors. About 2,500,000 unborn infants, some of them big enough to scream when wrenched from the womb, have been law- fully slaughtered since Mrs Thatcher took office, quoting St Francis of Assisi. Howev- er, many people do not regard the foetus as life, so I will limit myself to the undermin- ing of the sanctity of life among those clas- sified by law as human beings.
Killing another, whether murder in the old sense, or manslaughter, as most delib- erate killings are now classified, or by steal- ing a car and mowing people down in the street, or by driving an enemy to suicide, is no longer taken seriously in Britain — at any rate as a rule. Sir Kenneth Dover, gen- erally referred to as 'a distinguished aca- demic', recently boasted in his autobiogra- phy how he had wanted to get rid of a difficult colleague, and though there was some tut-tutting in the papers, the DPP took not the slightest notice. If an ill-treated wife kills her husband, or vice versa, there is quite a chance that she, or he, on convic- tion, will walk forth from the court free, 'time spent in custody' being taken into consider- ation. So will most homicidal motorists.
It is true that, for the small number of killings still classified as murder, life sen- tences are mandatory, for the time being. I am old enough to remember the abolition debates in the 1960s, and to recall that all those who campaigned for the replacement of hanging by life imprisonment swore to us that 'life would mean life'. I suspected at the time they were lying, just to get the abolition on the statute book, and of course they were. 'Life imprisonment' now means an average of 13 years. Many serve much less and emerge to commit additional crimes, including murder. Whenever I hear an abolitionist go on about the two or three cases in which an innocent man was hanged, I think of the 80 innocent people — being added to at the rate of two or three per year — who have been slaugh- tered by recidivist killers released from jail since the abolitionists won their famous vic- tory. The ruling Establishment, which is overwhelmingly abolitionist (as opposed to the people, four out of five of whom believe that to take life deliberately should be capitally punished), are not interested in these pathetic victims, who are for the most part old, poor or children.
Secondly, I deplore the loss of liberty produced during the last two decades by the unceasing proliferation of theft. We now live in a world of locks and double- locks, bolts, nailed-up windows, door- chains, alarms and safety devices. Man is born free but is everywhere under lock and key — on the instructions of insurance companies. The endless business of locking and unlocking does not of course mean that one's property is safe. Every single member of my family has been the victim of theft in the last year, some of them more than once. This is an almost universal experi- ence. And don't tell me the crime rate has gone down. No one believes the figures any more for the simple reason that everyone knows, from personal experience, that peo- ple no longer bother to report thefts or break-ins, except for insurance purposes. No one has much confidence in the police recovering anything stolen or catching the thief. In the unlikely circumstances of cap- ture, no victim believes the offender will be `So where are these bloody "bluebirds" then?' adequately punished. We all know crime pays, unless the criminal is very stupid. Our confidence in the legal system to produce justice or security has gone. This is a seri- ous cause of unhappiness among the immense majority and outweighs many of the material blessings we now enjoy.
The third way in which life seems to have gone downhill morally since 1979 concerns sensibility and taste. We have become more coarse. Not quite all of us, but the vast majority. Why did those grey-haired, mid- dle-class ladies protesting about something, probably a respectable cause in itself, have to wear headbands, ostensibly aimed at the police but actually for the benefit of the cameras, saying 'Sod off!' — and worse? I found this profoundly depressing. The kind of language, monotonous in its obscenity, which I first came across in the barrack room when I was doing my army basic training, now seems to have invaded every sphere of life. We have become a foul- mouthed nation, a people who have all learned to 'swear like troopers'.
The coarsening of everyday language reflects a general willingness to discuss openly every conceivable aspect of sexual behaviour, not just on late-night television, where soft porn is yielding rapidly to hard porn, but in tabloid newspapers which lie around for every literate child to absorb.
In the mid-1970s it was still just possible for schoolchildren to reach puberty with innocent hearts, believing in heroes and heroines, in high romance and purity of mind and spirit. That kind of guileless sim- plicity, so precious, so fragile, so unworldly and delightful to behold, has now been banished forever from our society. The immaculate child is no more, and this emo- tional infanticide has occurred under a Conservative government which, to be sure, has not actually promoted the all-envelop- ing tide of ordure, but has done absolutely nothing to stop it.
All these things make me uneasy about enjoying the material blessings to which Charles Moore pays tribute. We are living in those high-prosperity areas, the Cities of the Plain. Perhaps divine providence has designed the coming of Labour to power as the contemporary equivalent of chapter 19 of the Book of Genesis, when 'the Lord rained upon Sodom and Gomorrah brim- stone and fire . . . and he overthrew the cities, and all the plain, and all their inhabitants'.
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