ANOTHER VOICE
Is hanging too good for Mr Murdoch's underclass?
AUBERON WAUGH
Or so we read in the tabloids. I always liked to think that these vindictive and mer- cenary sentiments were put into the mouths of the bereaved by reporters who knew what their editors wanted, that the huge majority in favour of hanging would disap- pear when people were confronted by the realities of their choice. People said that they favoured a return of capital punish- ment because they felt that was what they were expected to say; because they did not wish to be drawn into a quarrel. In reality, they had not thought much about the mat- ter and did not really care; they reckoned that the risk of being hanged unjustly was probably smaller than the risk of being murdered, and so tended to side with the victim. Moreover, to be in favour of hang- ing was to be agin the government and agin the liberal establishment, which was always rather fun.
Or so I imagined until I saw the results of the Sun poll. In order to vote, Sun readers had been required to go to a telephone and dial an 0898 number, in many cases spend- ing good money of their own to do so. These were not idle, defensive answers given to a poll researcher in the street. And the result of the enquiry, conducted on these terms, was that 177,660 Sun readers voted to restore capital punishment for the murder of children. Only 3,000 voted against.
The implications of this are rather fright- ening. It suggests that we are not a nation of idle cab-drivers, as I imagined, so much as a nation of highly motivated sadists. Nobody should be impressed by the fact that the vote referred only to the murder of children. We all know that the lower classes feel particularly tender about children —
you can tell this by the noises they make when a child is brought on stage during a pantomime, by the way they treat pae- dophiles in prison, by the way they assault any school-teacher who rebukes their chil- dren and in a hundred subtle ways. But there is no reason to treat child-murder as worse than parent-murder, unless you are particularly anxious to find some excuse to restore hanging and feel that popular indig- nation might create a greater demand for it in the case of children. In one of the three child-murders which gave rise to the. Sun poll, police were holding a 15-year-old boy as their chief suspect, so that it looked rather as if the 177,660 readers of the Sun, who took the trouble to telephone, hoped for a child-hanging to assuage their indig- nation over a child-murder.
But the simple truth about those 177,660 people who bothered to telephone is surely that they like hanging, rather than that they feel particularly tender towards children. One can point out that readers of the Sun include the lowest and vilest people in the land; that many of them probably live on the twilight borders of insanity induced by constant masturbation over the pictures supplied for their titillation by Mr Mur- doch; that even the enormous figure of 177,660 is quite a small proportion of the Sun's total readership. But then one reflects that the 177,660 probably made up only a small proportion of the number who agreed, but who did not have access to a telephone, or who were reluctant to stop masturbating even for the time it took to make the call, or who dialled the wrong number and poured out their filthy desires to some housewife in Solihull instead.
'It's the Emperor's new Benetton clothes.' No doubt a poll among readers of the Guardian or Independent would have pro- duced different results. You have to search harder for their sadistic secrets — look at the way they make their husbands change the nappies, or really enjoy crunching up their vegetables. But my point is that the Sun poll establishes what one was reluctant to accept from ordinary opinion polls, or casual conversation in pub or taxi, that a substantial part of the British working class is genuinely dedicated to a sadistic delight in capital punishment. My fond belief that in the event of a national referendum on the subject common sense would eventually prevail, is almost certainly wrong. They like executions, and that is about the size of it.
The lesson, surely, is never to appeal to the people. Politicians and suchlike have to do so, of course, and a large part of the politician's art must he in developing the skills to manipulate other people's preju- dices in the desired direction. So do busi- nessmen who have to sell things on the mass market. But anyone who applies the concept of popular approval to any aspect of his life's philosophy or behaviour is building his house upon a pile of shit. The art of survival in the modern democratic world is to identify those areas in which individuals can be persuaded to dissent from the vulgar majority, and to work away on them, establishing a conscious and moti- vated rejection of the mass culture among people of superior intelligence and more generous instincts.
All of which must somehow be achieved without murdering other people's kids and burying them in huge numbers underneath our floorboards. Possibly the most we can hope to achieve is the occasional free par- don for such as Derek Bentley, 38 years after he was hanged. Even this empty ges- ture against the 177,660 who telephoned to demand more hanging is better than noth- ing. The essential point is that Derek Bent- ley and Timothy Evans were like them. If they were alive today, both would as likely as not be Sun readers and have voted for the restoration of hanging. It is the Sun's readers who will end up dangling from a rope, not the dainty readers of the Guardian and the Independent. Is it, per- haps, the product of some residual sense of their own worth which makes Sun readers, and the editorial writers who pander to them, so peculiarly greedy for a return of the death penalty?
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