Oh, Good, The Majority of Tories Back the Death Penalty

Listen we all want to die but personally I’d prefer it to be on my terms. So like: dive into an old crumbling orange quarry with just a perfect small layer of aquamarine water at the bottom of it, head’s gone neck’s gone dead. Or like: sprinting towards the Queen, arms outstretched, at a public sporting event, seconds before being shot to mist by snipers, BBC live feed. Always quite wanted to die like one of those parkour lads who go up big skyscrapers with GoPros attached to them, one final finger pinging free of the only platform supporting me, and then I flutter to the ground, no need to yell, just silence. Wouldn’t it be good to have an organ just explode, inside you, instant death. All good ways to go. One bad way though, I suppose, if I very much had to say, would be hanging to death by a rope while a baying mob of Brexit voters chant about how I’m scum.

Bad news, then: the majority of Conservative voters back the death sentence, this poll says, as per Queen Mary University, look:

So I mean yes obviously it’s just a poll. Nobody dies as the result of a poll! That would be silly, that would be absurd. But also the poll does sort of give a pretty good barometer of the overwhelming groundswell of the (mostly Tory-voting, if the last three elections are anything to go by) country as a whole: only 11% of Conservative voters polled thought austerity had gone too far, for instance, compared to 98% Labour/75% Lib Dem; only 41% of Conservatives polled supported gay marriage, compared to 8/10 members of the other collected parties. There are divides among the voting publics, deep ones, but overwhelming opinion leans conservative and right. I mean look at these two questions, put curiously side-by-side:

We like rules, in this country, and strict adherence to them from a young age. Children should respect authority, deeply, the poll says. Criminals should be slaughtered to death for their crimes. Rules at both ends of life. Don’t sin lest you die. It’s simple, really, the conservative outlook: follow the rules to the letter and don’t ever undulate outside of them and we’ll never have to kill you or stop your benefits or anything. Just give up a larger part of your sentience to the grid-like cage of the system, and you’ll be fine[1].

(It is the year 2025. President Johnson has just re-instated the death penalty. “Just for murderers,” P. Johnson says. “And the bad sex ones. Just the top two bad crimes. Maybe traitors, dunno. But mainly: the top two.” The first person to be killed is a man from Scarborough who stabbed his wife, and as he hangs in glorious 4K on a YouTube live stream watched by millions, we say, “I’m not exactly okay with this, but I’m not exactly not okay with this.” We sigh and say, “Well I mean he did stab his wife.”)

Do you remember where you were when the death penalty was last enacted in this country? I don’t, because I was barely even spunk. The last sentencing in England was 1965, though the defendant was later released from prison in 1979. 1964 for Scotland (suicide in prison in 1970), 1963 for Wales (reprieved), 1973 for northern Ireland (didn’t happen, quashed on appeal in 2012). It’s a little bit blue passport, this nostalgia for death: older voters, but not quite old enough, weirdly wistful for putting nooses round prisoner’s necks, and, like, ha’pennies, and national service. It’s like me missing the Commodore 64 or the Cold War. They were sort of done before I was able to have opinions about them.

(The year is 2050, and Great Ruler Johnson has just slaughtered his hundred thousandth prisoner, an 18-year-old from south-west London caught shoplifting a box of nappies from a Tesco Extra. Bodies line the electric fences on either side of London’s 45 bridges. Skulls, piled into a stack, adorn the Mall. “MORE BLOOD,” G. R. Johnson calls for, over the megaphones that corner our every street. “BRING. ME. MORE. BLOOD.)

Anyway here’s Tim Bale, professor of politics at QMU, translating the findings today: "Britain's party members are the lifeblood and the footsoldiers of our democracy. But that doesn't necessarily mean they look like or think like their parties' voters – or, indeed, look or think like each other. The Tory grassroots in particular are something of a breed apart from their Labour, Lib Dem and SNP counterparts."

(It’s 2051, and you’re up next against the dock. You were late three times to work, and you know the rules now. Glorious Leader Johnson is the judge presiding. “I sentence…—“ G. L. Johnson says, and bear in mind every sentence he has passed down for 20 consecutive years has been "death", the prisons lie empty, “—… deATH!”, and everyone cheers – this is happening inside a colosseum, before an audience of thousands – and everyone starts chanting, “Death! Death! DEATH! DEATH!”, and then the robot soldiers come, their hologram rifles already drawn, circling in from every angle, and you sort of knew, didn’t you, when you read the findings of that poll, you always knew that this was how it would end: you, shot to death by faceless soldiers, as a robo-augmented overlord watched onwards, while the people cheer. In a way, now, you’re ready for it. Close your eyes, resigned to your fate.)

It’s only a poll anyway chill out

@joelgolby

[1] Unless it involves paying tax, then there’s leeway