The great hanging debate: it’s an elaborate PR stunt

Sir George Young, the minister in charge of Commons business, is misleading the hanging and flogging lobby by giving the impression that there is likely to be any early substantive vote on the return of the death penalty because of e-petitions calling for capital punishment to be restored.

Sir George is a dripping wet Tory toff. Known in Westminster as the 'bicycling baronet', he is said to have been tolerated by Margaret Thatcher because he had nice legs.

Writing in the Daily Mail, house mag for supporters of the death penalty, Sir George says that the motive behind launching the e-petition website was to make Parliament more relevant to ordinary people.

"If lots of people want Parliament to do something which it rejects, then it is up to MPs to explain the reasons to their constituents," he writes. "What else is Parliament for? People have strong opinions and it does not serve democracy well if we ignore them or pretend that their views do not exist."

The Daily Mail duly headlined his article: 'MPs cannot ignore clamour for debate on the death penalty.'

Well, I hate to break it to Daily Mail readers, but the truth is, yes they can. The rules of Sir George's e-petition site say that if a petition attracts 100,000 backers, then it must be considered for debate by MPs.

But there is nothing in the rules about a substantive vote - and MPs could shuffle it off to a debate in Westminster Hall, not even in the main chamber.

In short, it's all an elaborate PR exercise after the expenses scandal to lift MPs out of the gutter.

Even the way Sir George's e-petition web site is organised - it crashed yesterday - is working against the pro-hanging lobby. There are more than 20 petitions calling for the death penalty and despite the efforts of blogger Guido Fawkes to promote his own petition the most successful so far, he still has only 3,977 signatures. A counter-petition opposing the return of the death penalty has attracted 7,345 signatures.

Unless Sir George consolidates the calls for the return of the death penalty into one petition, none of the competing individual petitions is ever likely to reach the magic 100,000 threshold.

The last time the death penalty was debated in the Commons was during the passage of the Human Rights Act in 1998, a year after Tony Blair swept to power on a Labour landslide. Restoration was rejected by 294 to 136, a majority against of 158 votes. Despite the promise of a free vote, the votes broke down on party lines.

Now the Tories are back in power, many would agree it would be healthy to give Parliament another opportunity to vote on the death penalty. But would the margin be any narrower?

After the MPs' expenses scandal forced many MPs to stand down, it is estimated that 50 per cent of the 2010 intake of MPs were new faces who have never had the chance to vote on the death penalty.

Many new Tory MPs will be cast in the mould of their modernising leader, David Cameron, and might well vote against. Labour have voted almost as a block against the death penalty, and are likely to do the same again. But at least a debate would settle the issue for another generation. Cameron was not even an MP at the time of the 1998 debate - it is time he voted on the issue.

But MPs should not need e-petitions to tell them what to debate. It would clear the air if every new Parliament had the opportunity to debate the death penalty regardless of the public relations exercise organised by Sir George Young.

If the MPs want to debate e-petitions, they would be showing greater bravery if they debated some of the other petitions on Sir George's website - abolish MPs' expenses (eight signatures so far), compulsory IQ tests for all MPs (five) or link MPs' salaries to average wages (64). ·