The right decision

The House of Commons, on a free vote, has taken the right decision on capital punishment. The House of Lords ought not to complicate the issue by dissenting. The Government has asked Parliament to abolish capital punishment, rather than revert to the anomalies and difficulties of the 1957 Act, and the Home Secretary has backed the argument with a powerful case. That the Commons should have reached the decision they did is common sense.

Society must punish murderers or else give in to violence. This was common ground in yesterday's debate on hanging. But for the same reason - that violence is antisocial - society must also try to diagnose not just the statistics of violence but the violent people behind them. Mr Callaghan's announcement that the Government is to sponsor a thorough programme of research into the causes and prevention of all types of violent crime added purpose to yesterday's debate. An inquiry is needed as seldom before. The motive for murder is usually clear. But the motive for simple violence is not, and it matters. The Bedford College report, although described as "interim," shows clearly that there has been an appalling increase in wounding offences and the increase seems to be continuous and continuing. The number of cases of malicious wounding known to the police in an average year in the early 1930s was 1, 232. The annual increase between 1955 and 1959 was 8, 210. The figure for 1960 was 12, 295 and the figure for 1967 was 24, 036, an increase of nearly 100 per cent in seven years.

The Bedford College report says that the figures show three factors that are important. "First the relative stability of the murder - manslaughter rate over the period ; secondly, the lack of apparent connection between murder and manslaughter on the one hand and wounding offences on the other; and thirdly, the smallness of the gross total of murder and manslaughter offences compared with woundings." In other words people kill each other as infrequently as ever but have now taken to wounding each other much more often and at a steadily increasing rate. Nor do the British usually use weapons. Mr F. H. McLintock, the criminologist who is to carry out one of the new research projects, has already found that in the past at any rate fewer than 10 per cent of those convicted carried weapons.

These facts are puzzling and disturbing. If non-homicidal violence is a social disease it is one that is becoming epidemic. And if it is a disease it will have to be diagnosed before it can be cured. Mr Callaghan must give his investigators all the backing they need.