ABSTRACT
Chapter 9. The shift in public opinion inspired abolitionists in the House of Commons to try again in February 1956 to get rid of the death penalty. As in 1948, the government of the day misjudged the strength of abolitionist feeling in the Commons, and the House of Lords again rode to the government’s rescue. This forced the Conservative government of the day to regain the political initiative with a bill on degrees of murder, limiting capital punishment to the most “deterrable” crimes, an approach which the royal commission had declared unworkable. The measure sought only to avoid defeat on abolition; it was, as many claimed, a “Tory party-preservation” bill. The Homicide Act 1957 was a terribly flawed law, and would in the long run only strengthen the abolitionist cause. Yet the only conclusion one can draw from these set-piece parliamentary battles between retentionists and abolitionists, or essentially between Conservative and Labour MPs (since the political consensus on penal reform evaporated where the death penalty was concerned), is that the debate over the death penalty served periodically to revive retributive sentiment, propel public opinion in punitive directions, and undermine any attempt to create a new structure of punishment. The death penalty was a powerful symbol of an enduring retributive penal consciousness.
