News 2020

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The Prime Minister has rejected opposition calls for another free vote on capital punishment during the present parliament. The leader of the opposition, Boris Johnson, said that the Government was denying parliament its legitimate democratic rights and that the campaign would continue.

Because of his fervent commitment to human rights and his passionate belief in the perfectability of man, the Prime Minister is known to be personally opposed to capital punishment, although the option to reintroduce it in Britain has been available since the UK opted out of the European Declaration on Human Rights.

The opt-out paved the way for the Sexual Perversity Act, which re-legalised corporal punishment except between consenting adults. The Minister of Justice, John Ketch, was in favour of a capital punishment pilot project in Scotland and Northern Ireland, but was persuaded by the Prime Minister to settle for the reintroduction of penal servitude and hard labour for juveniles.

Several MPs spoke in favour of capital punishment today, stressing the deterrent capacity of televised executions and the possibility of viewer participation in the process of justice by holding polls as to the method of execution.

The Prime Minister admitted the moral value of such ideas, but said that televised executions would less efficient than the prison system both in controlling crime and in redeeming criminals. "A given criminal can only be executed once," the Prime Minister said, "whereas each separate instance of perpetrator restraint and rehabilitation by the private sector represents a new chance of human resource efficientation and a new source of profit for British business."

While he also admitted that executions would relieve the overcrowding in many of Britain's prisons, the Prime Minister said that if present trends continued, the rising rate of self-inflicted justice among inmates would effectively ameliorate the problem within a few years.