News in Review
Death Penalty
During the eight weeks up to the end of January of this year, more than fifty murders were known to have been committed in England and Wales. This is pretty well double the rate at which they were occurring before the Homicide Act of 1957 relaxed the death penalty, although for various reasons it is impossible to draw strict comparisons.
Because some of the recent murders were connected with sexual assaults upon very young girls, and others with robberies sometimes involving several thousands of pounds, the ghoulish press gave them the full treatment. There was a demand, inside and outside Parliament, for a stricter death penalty.
Some of this demand was doubtless based on a desire for revenge. This is a wholly emotional attitude, which disregards the fact that revenge is useless to the murdered victim. The other argument for the death penalty—that it is a unique deterrent to would-be murderers—is quite unsupported by evidence.
The debate on the best method of punishing murderers takes no account of the basic cause of their actions. To find that, we must examine our social organisation—the brutalising influence of poor living conditions, of periodic wars, the impossible personal relationships which poverty forces upon us.
The hanging fiends are just as far off the mark as the worried reformers. Neither group wants to alter society’s basis; but that is the only effective method of tackling the murder problem.
Lies in Fleet Street
The Mirror-Odhams deal was really big stuff—and it was accompanied by what can only be called some big stuff lies.
On 26th January, a press conference was given details of the proposed merger between Odhams Press and Thomson Newspapers. Sir Christopher Chancellor, Odhams’ chairman, stated definitely that no bid had been made by the Daily Mirror. At the same time, a Mirror director issued a comprehensive denial that any bid had come from them.
We now know that the Mirror had, in fact, made known their intention to bid or Odhams some days before the intended Odhams-Thomson merger was announced. This merger was actually designed as a defensive move against the might of the Mirror’s financial resources.
Naturally, these misleading statements are justified by !he companies involved, who argue that such “secrecy” is necessary to safeguard their commercial interests.
That may well be. But most of the day-to-day events of capitalist society on which the newspapers report and comment are also influenced by some sort of commercial interest.
What reason, therefore, have we to believe that newspaper reports on wars, strikes, crime and so on are any more accurate than the all-round denials of what turned out to be the Mirror’s anxious interest in the future of Odhams?
Crime and Punishment
On his release from Dartmoor Prison after serving a sentence of seven years’ preventive detention, Christopher Patrick Sullivan stole two mailbags at King’s Cross Station. As a punishment for this theft, Sullivan has gone back to Dartmoor, this time for ten years. It was Sullivan’s eighth conviction. To the bigoted upholder of the sanctity of private property over broad human interests, justice will have been done. To the Socialist the sentence of ten years’ preventive detention for stealing two mailbags is a savage and inhuman gesture of hopeless failure in present methods of “dealing” with social delinquency. And this after a century of reform.
In practice, the view that there is equality before the law is fallacious. The aim of the law and of the punishments that enforce it is mainly the protection of property, and most offences against the law concern property. As the ownership of most property and especially the means of life and the privileges that arise from this ownership are restricted to a relatively small social class, then the whole structure of law and punishments must be biased in favour of the interests of the privileged class that owns. The majority of those who are underprivileged, in the sense that they own very little, accept this situation. The retribution of the law attempts to coerce into law-abiding conformity a minority of criminals. Socialists advocate the abolition of the private ownership of property which will lead to a situation where crime could not arise.
The notion that men commit crime as a result of a fundamental ill-will in their make-up must be dismissed. Crime must be understood in relation to the social context in which it happens. It is not that the malignancy of human nature creates anti-social human beings. The case of Sullivan is a tragedy and in its cruel sadness we all have a share.
“Democratic” Portugal
The recent seizure of the Santa Maria by an armed group led by Captain Galvao, on the instructions of the exiled General Delgado, has focused attention on Portugal.
The Portuguese monarchy was overthrown in 1911, and after 15 years of political instability Dr. Salazar came to power. Amongst those who supported him were Captain Galvao and General Delgado. The regime in Portugal— Britain’s “oldest ally “—is one of dictatorship, where only one political party is permitted and opposition is suppressed. The office of Prime Minister, held by Dr. Salazar, is the top job, with that of President merely the state figure-head. General Delgado stood for the Presidency in 1958, but was defeated, and in 1959 sought political asylum in Brazil. After this election, Dr. Salazar redrafted the Constitution so that in future the President would be chosen not by the voters, but by the hand-picked Parliament.
After the war, Captain Galvao was commissioned to report on the Portuguese colonies of Angola, Guinea and Mozambique and his report was presented to the National Assembly in 1947. The report was suppressed and, shortly afterwards, Galvao was imprisoned. From the extracts of the report published in the Observer (29th January 1961) it is obvious that the Portuguese Government could not have been pleased with Galvao’s disclosures. The report shows the terrible treatment of the Africans in these colonies—the forced labour from which “only the dead” were exempted; the façade of medical care, behind which even minimum sanitary conditions did not exist; the very high infant mortality (60%) and the mortality rates amongst workers, 40% not being rare.
General Delgado’s avowed aims are first to oust Salazar. He says that he wants to lessen the economic gap between Portugal’s tiny minority of wealthy families and her desperately poor working population, and to democratise the colonies; to have universal suffrage both in Portugal and the colonies and vastly to improve education. Portugal is the least industrialised country in Europe, and Delgado may well have been reflecting that it is essential to have an educated working class in order to develop industrially.
The Socialist sympathises with aspirations to political democracy, but there is no guarantee that Delgado’s professed aims would be achieved if he succeeded to power in Portugal, nor is there any guarantee that in a private property society, democracy, once obtained, will remain in being. He may, like many political candidates, be only dangling a bunch of carrots in front of the donkey’s nose, in order to obtain personal support. It is possible that Delgado is voicing the aspirations of a new stratum of Portuguese society, a capitalist class whose needs, namely an educated working class, are directly opposed to those of the entrenched, almost feudal aristocracy administered by Salazar.