Two days after the suicide bomb attack at the Manchester Arena that left 22 dead, Russian Senator Aleksei Pushkov, chairman of the Federation Council Commision on Information Policy and former chair of the Duma Foreign Affairs Committee, :
That there is growing support for the reintroduction of the death penalty in Turkey is not news, given that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has such a move as he consolidates power in the aftermath of last July’s failed coup.
But it is surprising that Pushkov spoke of such clamor in the United Kingdom, where capital punishment was abolished in 1965 (though remained in Northern Ireland until 1973), and no vote on the matter has been held in Parliament since 1994.
Pushkov’s comments may well have been inspired by an published that same morning in the pro-Kremlin Izvestia newspaper. According to the article, Britain’s UK Independence Party (UKIP) “is proposing reintroducing the death penalty.”
The problem here is that the only source named by Izvestia is Janice Atkinson, a member of the European Parliament. Atkinson of UKIP. She was from the party on March 23, 2015, following the revelation that her chief of staff, Christine Hewitt, had inflated the MEP’s parliamentary expenses.
Atkinson now sits in the European Parliament as an independent, and, in June, 2015, left the Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy group, of which UKIP is a member, the far-right Europe of Nations and Freedom alliance, which is dominated by France’s National Front party.
While UKIP’s leader, Paul Nuttal, did for the return of the death penalty for those convicted of pedophilia in November, 2016, while running for leadership, and Gisela Allen, a UKIP candidate in this year’s Glasgow City Council elections, that she wanted to reintroduce hanging, or even the guillotine, there is no mention of capital punishment in the UKIP for this year’s general election. It should also be noted that, at the time of writing, UKIP has no MPs in the House of Commons and conducted in May indicates the party may receive only of the national vote.
Other than Atkinson, the only prominent public figure in the UK to have called for the return of the death penalty since the Manchester attack has been , a model and reality TV star.
A search of Google Trends indicates in related to the death penalty in the UK since May 22. Indeed, interest in searches for the term has remained over the .
In fact, while support for the death penalty in the UK has always been considerably higher among the general population than in parliament, the general trend has been one of over the last 50 years, with support dropping below 50%, to polls conducted in 2015.
While Aleksei Pushkov may be right about Turkey (though there the matter is just as much to do with the coup attempt as it is the string of horrific terror attacks the country has suffered in recent years), his claim regarding the UK appears to be completely baseless.