No civilised society should be prepared to execute criminals. Not only does the death penalty fail to deter crime, it is an authoritarian overreach of state power. Yet the new deputy chair of the Conservative Party, Lee Anderson, expressed his support for it in an interview with the Spectator, conducted before his appointment. This flouts the UK’s democratic, liberal values and makes a mockery of the Tories’ supposed small-state convictions.
Anderson is rightly being heavily criticised, but a chunk of this critique is misdirected – some voices on social media have claimed the views are indicative of a “neanderthal” mindset among northerners in England. Though some Tory MPs have been quoted as saying that he “talks to a part of the country no one else in the party does”, Anderson is not a prophet of left-behind Britain. He is a culture-war caricature – the latest in a long line of brash, hyperbolic figures who have distorted perceptions of post-industrial areas.
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