POLITICAL KILLING
TN an article on another page Lord Templewood demonstrates 'the absurdity of the Government's latest attitude to the death penalty. By adopting its present course the Government has sacrificed principle, consistency and common sense on the altar of party expediency. But it may even now become unstuck. It has presumably calculated that on a free vote there is still an abolitionist majority in the Commons; otherwise it could have afforded to behave properly and give time to the Silverman Bill. And if this abolitionist majority manages to secure a second reading for the Silverman Bill the Government can hardly execute anybody, even if it passes its own Bill into law and obstructs the later stages of the Silverman Bill. Whether or not this happens, any execution from now on will be not judicial but political killing—the result of the Government bowing not to the will of the House of Commons but to the Llandudno mob.
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