If British democracy worked, we would have had a referendum on the death penalty

Nice to know, isn’t it, that public attitudes are finally catching up with MPs’? It seems, from the Social Attitudes survey, that finally, half a century after parliament suspended the death penalty, 48 per cent of people no longer want the death penalty reintroduced. Opinion has been stubbornly in favour of it ever since 1965, and that was also true in 1998 when the Human Rights Act forbade capital punishment outright. In other words, until now, MPs have been wildly at odds with the opinion of most voters on an undeniably important issue.

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Alexander Larman

Beware the middle of Lidl

I’m unsure exactly where I stand on the issue myself, though I’ve always felt the guillotine would have been my own choice of method if it came to it. I’m instinctively squeamish about state executions, though I’m sympathetic to the case for executing police killers. In fact the case for and against has rarely been better put than in Dead Man Walking – that movie with Susan Sarandon as a nun with a mission to death row – where the grimness of the execution was paralleled by matching footage of the murder that elicited the sentence.