Hanging around the red wall
The death penalty is bad, even if a northern Conservative MP likes it
Now that we have left the European Union, where do the successful Brexiters turn next? What does any returning combatant do when their cause is won? One answer would be to win the peace as they triumphed in the war, but in this particular case that would mean engaging in the detail of how Brexit might work best for Britain, and responsible governance is boring stuff for Whitehall nerds to deal with.
No, what these self-proclaimed “Spartans” and their allies want is another crusade. So they’ve been occupying themselves with suspect turns to financial advice, getting mad at “woke warrior teachers”, jumping feet first into covid crankery, and filming small boats crossing the Channel.
But none of it is really touching the sides. In the absence of Brexit as a motivator, how can they get the old team back together, reignite that spirit of 2016 where they stuck it to the establishment and those metropolitan liberals that they hate so much?
I worry that Lee Anderson, Conservative MP for Ashfield, may have found the answer this week when, in an interview with the Spectator, he stated his support for the death penalty. This worries me for a few reasons; unlike small boats or fighting against identity politics, the death penalty issue is easy enough to distil into a simple yes/no binary (god forbid we have a referendum on this); polling is mixed but there could well be a majority in the country for it; there is a lot of overlap between the Brexit coalition and support for capital punishment. It is not inconceivable that this becomes the next cause célèbre for social conservatives, and it is not inconceivable that they are successful. So it makes me nervous.
Rishi Sunak, to his credit, gave the idea of restoring the death penalty short shrift, but that didn’t stop political journalists immediately declaring that this was the sort of cultural wedge issue which could fire up working class Red Wall voters. Brendan O’Neill did his usual turn, of course, but then there was also this.
Regular readers will know that I have my complaints about Twitter activism. But whenever I have written about activists I have tried to keep my focus on the issues and the ideas; where the left fail to understand free speech, for example, I want to point out why they’re wrong, and why the positions they stake out are antithetical to any socially just politics.
What I hope I don’t do is to judge an issue purely on how electorally viable it may be. The exchange above is extraordinary; Lee Anderson, an elected representative and the recently appointed vice-chair of the governing party, has said he wants to restore the death penalty. There seems to be zero consideration of this point from any of these men here. Is capital punishment good, or bad? Who cares, why would we talk about the actual issues, how will this go down in the Red Wall, and there was a Twitter pile-on anyway, so.
Online activists are incredibly annoying; Lee Anderson wants to give the state the power to execute people. There are degrees, here.
Fighting the last war, back to the same old schemas, the expectation from so much of the commentariat is that Labour and the left must permanently adopt a defensive crouch in front of figures like Lee Anderson; he left Labour for the Tories, doncha know, and he understands the Red Wall, so you can’t say he’s wrong. Why is it that social liberals - and it is only ever social liberals - are always being told we can’t talk about what sort of country we want to live in?
Goodness me, the idea that there has been little reflection on Labour’s lost heartlands these last seven years? Iain, we’ve heard about nothing else. And whilst I’m on the subject, the way the Red Wall electorate is represented in such discussions is frequently incredibly patronising. London-based political journalists clicking their tongues about how this sort of thing will lose Labour the North might well be surprised.
Well, I haven’t been a Labour member since I quit in the Corbyn years, and for various reasons I’m unconvinced by the current iteration of the party, so I speak for no-one other than myself here, but: I think capital punishment is monstrous, immoral, and stupid. It does not deter crime, it leads to innocent people being executed, the state should not have the power to murder its own citizens.
If me saying this is “shallow”, or shows a lack of reflection, I honestly don’t care. Opposing the death penalty is the right thing to do, regardless of whether it goes down badly in the Red Wall or not. There is more dignity in Labour and the left taking a principled stand on this point than in them pretending Lee Anderson is an avatar of every voter north of Birmingham and lying prostrate before him.
It is a real problem with political journalism that so much is focused on the horse race, Westminster gossip, how certain issues might cause certain parties difficulties in opinion polls, and yet there is so much less interest in matters of substance. We’re talking about capital punishment - literally life and death - and everything gets filtered through the prism of whether this might stop Labour winning Stoke-on-Trent North back next year.
Social liberals don’t exist to cower in front of the electorate, simperingly repeating whatever Lee Anderson or Nigel Farage said last week because that’s what they think northern voters want. Politics is about winning arguments, not just accepting your opponents’. The death penalty is wrong, and it’s important to say so, loud and clear.
The Midlands is not the North
Agree with some of the points made here, but not all of them. Unless you want to sound like a puritanical corbynista, compromises with the electorate do have to be made. And clumsily shoehorning Brexit into it was also rather tedious.