Poll: two thirds of public back death penalty for Letby
So we know where the Tories will go next. Utterly despicable.
'Half the public (49 per cent) would support reinstating the death penalty for ‘any murder’, a figure that has risen by eight points since February. More than half (52 per cent) back capital punishment for anyone who assassinates a Royal, a figure that rises to 54 per cent for those who kill a police officer, 59 per cent for a multiple murderer and 63 per cent for a child murderer. This last figure is up by six points since February. Other crimes have also been affected by this surge in support for the noose, with 59 per cent of the public saying they back the death penalty for those convicted of terrorism or multiple rapes.'
The Tories however despite 13 years in government have not reintroduced the death penalty for any crime and likely will not have a manifesto commitment to restore it either and nor will Labour make a promise to do so in their manifesto.
Just be grateful we have representative not direct democracy, with only RefUK perhaps likely to even consider restoring the death penalty for some crimes. If we went to a referendum on it it certainly would be back for some crimes. Another reason we don't need more referendums
Support for the death penalty usually rises, once some heinous crime gets reported.
Letby deserves to be put to death, but bring back hanging, and you run into all kinds of practical difficulties. The jury spent days poring over the evidence. Would they have given her the benefit of the doubt, had they known she'd be hanged?
It's easy enough to agree that the Letbys of this world deserve to be hanged, but do all murderers deserve to be hanged? In most cases, if we examined the evidence, we would probably say no. Most murders take place in a terrible moment of madness, rather than the kind of ruthless cold-blooded killing that Letby practised. So, we'd be left arguing over which murderers deserved death and which didn't, since we're obviously not going to hang 6-700 people a year.
Then, you get the miscarriages of justice.
Hanging probably lasted a generation longer in this country than it would otherwise, because of the Nuremberg trials. No one disputed that leading Nazis deserved the rope (and most of them got away with their crimes).
The start point of 6-700 can be immediately discounted, as people currently receiving a whole life tariff might get the death penalty. That's 68 people right now.
Is that 68 this year or 68 in total currently serving such sentences?
It was a speech at City Hall, not "Sadiq Khan's Office". His office is in the building admittedly but I somehow doubt they could fit a speech in.
Presumably this was just a small part of the speech in which he ran through all the injustices in history, starting with what the Macedonians did under that sod Alexander, and putting a monetary value on the reparations necessary to square things up.
In some cases there would of course be a netting out. We could use the money the Romans owe us for their invasion to set off against our colonial bill. The Normans must owe us a few quid for 1066 and all that..
The North in particular is owed on that score. Add in the Tudor depredations, and it's time for some serious levelling up.
Though if course if the UK is on the hook for a trillion a year (as claimed) for the next decade, we're all going to be living in grinding poverty.
Not a bit of it, Nigel.
Those wealthy Yanks must owe us a ton for the War of Independence, The French for the Napoleonic Wars, the Germans for u know what, and of course the Japanese.
We'll be quids in, mate, by the time it's all reckoned up. We'll be able to afford a few trillion a year, and then some.
Can't wait to see the figures. When's the UN publishing them?
Be fair to the UN Judge, he is prepared to kindly allow us between 10 and 25 years to pay our dues.
Most reasonable.
All of the charities and NGO's will be very supportive of these spurious claims as they will be the ones to administer it. There is alot of grift around.
We can add it to the trillions in climate reparations we owe too.
The only grifter we should be concerned about here is the judge himself.
He should be sacked, debarred, and made to pay reparations for all the harm done whilst in office.
Given the ECHR is funded by the West, isn’t his lifestyle funded by the proceeds of crime?
The Dutch have had five decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, continuously building new roads and cycling infrastructure.
We have have had 3 decades of encouraging cycling as a matter of policy, but without bothering to build the roads or accompanying cycling infrastructure that goes with new roads.
Have we caught up with the Dutch? Is cycling as popular today in the UK as it was in the Netherlands in the 00s at a comparable stage of development of cycling as policy? I wouldn't say so.
Building roads & cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands has worked far better than telling people to ride a bike but without building roads.
We aren't going to catch up with the Dutch, unless we actually do what the Dutch are actually doing. Rather than a mythical version of what the Dutch are doing, pretending that they're simply telling people to ride a bike and that's that.
You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have. Indeed, that's precisely what the Dutch did when they ran out of money for new roads.
Happily, councils everywhere have worked this out as the cost-effective way to get more people moving through our towns and cities, and continue to make progress despite the fuss being kicked up.
You just can't face the truth that we would need to remove some space from drivers on current roads to achieve the rates of cycling and cycle safety that the Dutch have.
What are you talking about?
I have said so repeatedly! It's like you're not reading what I've been writing.
On this page alone
Once: More roads, built with cycling infrastructure as standard = safer cycling and better driving. It also allows retrofitting old roads once new roads (with cycling infrastructure) are built to alleviate the traffic which is a double-win for cycling, which is why the Dutch have been doing this for fifty years now.
Twice: Building new roads (with cycling infrastructure) relieves demand on old ones which can then be retrofitted to be low traffic roads with cycling infrastructrure too.
Three times a lady: Converting old roads to local access roads, once new roads are built, like the Dutch do is precisely what I've been recommending for weeks while we've been having this conversation.
I am entirely in favour of converting old roads once new ones are built. I have advocated it. I am not at all against converging old roads and am fully in favour of copying the Dutch and investing in our transportation so it's achievable.
The Dutch unlike us never ran out of money or stopped construction. Which is why their system works.
But we've already built the new roads?
Yeah. I agree with much of what Barty says but since the 1970s (when the Dutch started investing seriously in cycle infrastructure) we have had 50 years of new roads after new roads. Even right now we have a £27bn major roads programme, and that's just Highways England - i.e. not the many new roads being built by local authorities.
The difference is that our new roads have, by and large, not been built with cycling infrastructure.
What new roads?
We've had bugger all new roads as a matter of policy for decades now.
The few new roads we do get now come with cycling provision as standard, we need much, much more of that.
Not so.
There has been major road building all across England in the last decade. Just a few of the many examples that I have done bits of work for.
Lincoln Eastern ring road A14 project including the new Huntingdon bypass A46 Dualling from Widmerpool to Newark A6 to Manchester Airport relief road Gedling Access Road - which is effectively a Nottingham Eastern bypass Congleton Link road Norwich Northern Distributor Road
And being built at the moment
Inverness Trunk Road Link Silvertown Tunnel Stubbington bypass A585 Little Singleton bypass A120 Little Hadham bypass Preston Western Distributor Road Heyhouses Link Road Wichelstowe Southern Access Grantham Southern Bypass Etruria Valley Link Road North Northallerton Link Road Newtownards Movilla Road to Donaghadee Road and Bangor Road Link Larne Distributor (South) Ballyclare Western Relief Road M6-M54 Link road
This is by no means an exhaustive list.
Yes minor bypasses and bits and pieces here and there. The A14 one is 12 miles and one of the biggest.
For a country that's added nearly 10 million population in the past two decades, that's pathetically little and barely scratching the surface of what is required.
And each of those typically comes with much cycling development, like the 24 miles of cycle paths to go with the 12 mile A14 project already discussed.
Rubbish. The A46 was 20 miles of new road. The Norwich Northern Distributor Road was 12 miles of new road.
Where do you expect to build brand new roads over any great distance when we already have such a dense road network? These are not 'minor' projects. They are exactly the sort of road building projects that we need to through take traffic away from town and city centres and to upgrade trunk routes. The A1 has been upgraded to motorway standard over much of its length over the past 30 years and that is still ongoing.
You seem to be looking for any excuse to avoid admitting you were wrong about the scale of roadbuilding.
We don't have a dense network. The Netherlands do, they have 36% more road miles per 100km^2 than we do.
We've added roughly ten million to our population. Proportionately that should have been many millions of new homes, and tens of thousands of miles of new roads.
We haven't kept pace in construction in either homes, nor infrastructure. We need both, because we have the people living here.
Yes the limited projects we have had are worthwhile but there should be an order of magnitude more of them.
The argument that a x% increase in population warrants a corresponding x% increase in the length of roads in the country is too simplistic. For starters, it assumes all the roads were at capacity to begin with, which clearly isn’t the case.
Well it generally scales with population density, which is why comparing UK to Netherlands (they have double the road density we do) is unreasonable, but comparing England to Netherlands (they have 36% more road density) seems more reasonable.
A 20% increase in population does roughly equate to a 20% increase in demand. But we've fallen well short of boosting either roads of housing supply by 20% to match the population growth.
Netting for population, our road capacity is going backwards not forwards. Just like our housing capacity.
Again, unless demand was already at 100% of road capacity, an increase in demand doesn’t necessarily require a one-to-one increase in capacity.
Then why does the Netherlands have 36% more road density than England?
Building roads works. Simply cramming more people into the same infrastructure doesn't. Either way, quite patiently I was right and road construction (like housing) has been totally neglected relative to population growth.
We need mass construction of houses, roads and cycle paths, all of the above not either or to handle our population growth.
And as long as we keep getting population growth in the hundreds of thousands per annum, that will continue to remain true.
I don’t know, but it has nothing to do with the point I am making unless their policy is to expand their road capacity at exactly the same rate as their population is increasing.
I was also not saying “ Simply cramming more people into the same infrastructure doesn't [work].”, I was saying your argument early that a 20% increase in population requires a 20% increase in road capacity is too simplistic.
But both traffic and road density does scale with population density.
After decades of neglect of our road network and rampant population growth, comparing England to peer nations, with our peer population density, like the Netherlands and Japan, we come up woefully short in road density. We do not have a dense road network.
And that's despite the fact those nations do better than we do in both cycling and public transport, which just goes to show that both of those are not alternatives to roads. Quite the opposite, building infrastructure makes public transport and cycling easier not harder.
I am not saying there is no scaling relation between traffic/road density and population density. What I am saying is that your earlier argument that a 20% increase in roads is required because of a 20% increase in population is too simplistic.
Of course its simplistic which is why I said roughly, it was an approximation.
But we've come nowhere close, which is why our roads are too busy and why cyclists don't feel safe.
Had we kept up with road construction to match population growth, like the Dutch have, we'd have safer roads, more cycling opportunities and less congestion.
No, you didn't. You said:
"But yes, our population has grown by nearly 20% in a generation, our road capacity should have grown by 20% too accordingly. Building a 12 mile bypass and a few other piddly things here and there is nothing to shout home about, there should be much more than that done."
Implying the need for a 1-to-1 increase in road capacity because of an increase in population.
Sorry, I said roughly in another post. A 20% increase in population does roughly equate to a 20% increase in demand. But we've fallen well short of boosting either roads of housing supply by 20% to match the population growth.
Yes maybe 19% or 21% would be better, its an approximation, it needn't be exactly 1:1, 0.9:1 may work.
0.1:1 does not though.
What level of road building would you want to achieve before you started putting cycle infrastructure on existing roads? Can you provide a rough cost estimate for that road building?
Before there was an example of the 12 mile A14 road built which has unlocked 24 miles of cycling routes.
I think as a general rule 2:1 or 3:1 of new cycling for new roads could be entirely reasonable on average. Apart from motorways all new roads in my view should have cycling provision as standard, so that's automatically 1:1, and then relieving old roads of traffic allows them to be converted too, so 2:1 or 3:1.
The Dutch have been doing this for 50 years, so its not an overnight project, but my rough estimate is I think over a decade maybe we should be considering investing a trillion into our roads and cycle network to boost our infrastructure and improve economic growth and unlock the potential for entirely new towns too. We're investing hundreds of billions into new rail lines and roads represent more than 10x the economic activity of rails.
Not the question I asked. You have repeatedly suggested that space cannot be taken away from cars until we have the same level of roads as the Dutch.
With your dubious 36% figure, that 90,000 additional miles. At £10 million a mile (not sure if that is correct?), that's £900 billion before you will even consider putting cycle lanes on existing roads.
I said start immediately, not in a decades time. 🤨
Apart from motorways that 90,000 additional miles should all have segregated cycling in my eyes as soon as its built (not on roads, not painted on pavement) and would unlock approximately another 90,000 - 180,000 miles of cycle paths from freeing up old roads.
How many miles of cycle paths do we have today?
And yes, £900bn sounds about right, lets round that up, what figure did I estimate?
Comments
Only took eight and a half hours to cross the border!
Take it out of the reparations budget?