I know why the government wants to send homosexuals back to Iran to be hanged

Gays are law-abiding, better-educated than the norm, economically productive and tend to be less of a drain on the state, says Rod Liddle. They don’t stand a chance in this country

Should we afford Iranian homosexuals political asylum in this country, or send them back to be hanged in their home country? I suppose there is a certain, dwindling, lobby in Great Britain which would argue we could hang them here and then bill Iran for the cost. Surely not many people still cleave to such a view — although we ought to remember that within my lifetime homosexuality was illegal in Great Britain. This point is made frequently by lefties who wish to draw some sort of equivalence between the Muslim world and our own country — see, we persecuted the poofs too. Yes, we did, unforgiveably — but we didn’t actually hang them, or whip them. Or indeed, as they do in Iran and Saudi Arabia, whip them first and then hang them.