Notebook
Someof my best friends are hangers, but Iwill always have a slight preference for those of my best friends who are not. This may be very unfair, but I can't help it. Enthusiasm for the death penalty is an emotion on which I cannot look kindly. The deterrence argument has never been strong enough to justify it. There have to be other motives which only Christopher Booker could explain, and I do not like the idea of them. As the Spectator said in a leading article last April, 'there is only one argument against capital punishment, which is that it is wrong: there is an absolute, principled objection to the taking of a man's life by the state.' Like the founding fathers of the United States, I hold this truth to he self-evident, which puts me rather out of sympathy with Mr. Eldon Griffiths and his friends, however representative they may be of the popular will. What I find particularly creepy about Mr. Griffiths IS his proposal that new forms of execution should be examined. He is presumably worried about the revulsion which many People feel towards the macabre ritual of hanging and would like to make execution more acceptable (with pills or injections, Perhaps?). This is quite horrible. If capital Punishment were to be restored (and I might have to emigrate if it was), it should be recognised for what it is — an act of public retribution. People should accept the consequences of their primitive emotions. I would suggest, indeed, that hangings should take place in public, if I did not fear that people would enjoy the spectacle too much.
Why are the British people so devoted to the death penalty? We have, indeed, endured a wave of terrorism which has aroused understandable feelings of hatred towards its perpetrators. But we are not the only people to have suffered such provocation. The Italians, for example, have been similarly Provoked, but in Italy there is practically no demand for the restoration of capital punishment. Whatever the merits of the issue it is disturbing that it looms so large in the Public mind. Is this not yet another symptom of our decline in national selfconfidence and of the pettiness and meanness of spirit which this has induced? We are frightened that we cannot stop terrorists except by hanging them, just as we are frightened that our society might not survive the admission of a few thousand Vietnamese refugees. Perhaps we are all becoming like the inhabitants of Helford, 'Cornwall's most exclusive village', who — according to the Guardian — have banded together to prevent the opening nearby of a home for 15 mentally handicapped children. But let US hope we are better than that. Just as most people can remember what they were doing on the day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated, they can remember what they were doing on the day ten years ago when a man first landed on the moon. I watched the moon-landing live on a television set in a fourth-floor office in Rome, with a balcony overlooking the Piazza di Spagna. As soon as Neil Armstrong had set foot on the moon's surface and uttered his carefully rehearsed 'historic' remark, I felt suddenly horrified and rushed out on to the balcony to see if the poor old moon was still all right. It was a full moon, shining away imperviously in a clear sky, and for some reason I found this very reassuring. Nothing too appalling had happened.
If the whites of Zimbabwe-Rhodesia continue to fear the consequences of a black takeover of their country, they can hardly be blamed. The precedents are not encouraging, particularly in Tanzania. The story of Mrs June Damm is a cautionary tale. Mrs Damm was the joint owner with her husband of a 45,000-acre farm in Tanzania, stocked with 8,000 head of cattle and 7,000 sheep. She was estranged from her husband, but still living nearby in another house on the farm, when he and his mistress were murdered jn May 1974. First she was jailed in unbelievably squalid conditions, interrogated and deprived of food. Then the farm was taken over by the Tanzanian government, and the army moved in. Out of prison, but penniless, she was the nominal owner of about £50,000 which the Tanzanian authorities refused to release. Subsequently, the Tanzanian government agreed to buy the farm from her at a valuation of £400,000. The past five years of her life have been spent in desperate attempts to get at least enough of this money out of Tanzania to be able to survive in England. During this period, she was shot and wounded in Tanzania and her daughter beaten up. She lost many of her possessions in a fire and has had four operations, two as a result of the shooting. Heavy death duties were demanded before she had even received any money. And the outcome, every possible effort having been made to obtain justice from the Tanzanian authorities, is that Mrs Damm has now been allowed to remit a maximum of £1,000 a year to England, while she has had to leave most of her personal possessions in Tanzania.
'Looking back. . . I can hardly remember a single civil case in which I thought that the jury were wrong .In civil cases they get a sort of wisdom which is greater collectively than the wisdom of any one of them'. Thus Lord Gardiner in 1966, when he was Lord Chancellor. Since then, however, the property-holding qualification for jUrors has been abolished, and it has simultaneously become easier for middle-class professional men to obtain exemption from jury service. In other words, juries nowadays tend to look a bit thick. While one hopes that their collective wisdom has not been too gravely impaired, there have quite often recently been grounds for doubt — particularly when juries have been called upon to award damages for libel. Sums awarded as 'compensation' for injury to reputation have tended to be absurdly high. The time therefore has come to implement a recommendation made four years ago by the Faulks Committee on Defamation: that the judge should fix the sum within a category — e.g. substantial, moderate, nominal — decided by the jury.
A milk bottle arrived on my doorstep this week with a paper collar round its neck, announcing that 'Next week your pinta changes shape'. 'During the next few days,' the message from Express Dairy went on, 'we shall be introducing the new Modern Pintie Milk bottle'. I would not wish to pass judgment on this decision until the 'new Modern Pintie Milk bottle' makes its first appearance, but a drawing of it shows it to be fatter and squatter than the existing more swan-like bottle which, believe it or not, has remained unchanged for some 40 years. The 'Modern Pintie' version also has a narrower neck, designed — according to a spokesman for Express Dairy — to stop milk bottles being 'abused'. It has never occurred to me to abuse a milk bottle, but apparently many people use them as flower vases for putting on graves or as receptacles for engine oil, which means that they do not get returned. The 'Modern Pintie' will be smaller and lighter, but somehow just as big inside, so that vans will be able to take bigger loads. Unattractive though all this sounds, one cannot complain too much. The new bottles will at least be made of glass and will be returnable. And in some parts of Wales, a wide-necked bottle with a cardboard disc cover —a type even older than the pre-war one now being replaced in London — is still in use.
Alexander Chancellor
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