An outspoken MP who is the newly appointed deputy chairman of the Conservative Party has said he would support the return of the death penalty because “nobody has ever committed a crime after being executed”.
Ashfield MP Lee Anderson was gthe position, working as one of new chairman Greg Hand’s lieutenants in the run-up to the next election, by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak during Tuesday’s reshuffle.
Mr Anderson, a former Labour councillor before converting to the Tories, has been no stranger to controversy since being elected to Westminster in 2019.
He has in the past criticised food bank users, and the England men’s football team for taking the knee in protest against racism.
A few days before his appointment, Mr Anderson told The Spectator that he would support the UK reintroducing the death penalty.
He also suggested using Royal Navy frigates to return to France those arriving in small boats across the English Channel.
“Nobody has ever committed a crime after being executed," Mr Anderson said. “You know that, don’t you? One hundred per cent success rate.”
The death penalty for murder in the UK was outlawed permanently in 1969, and abolished for all crimes in 1998.
The last people executed in Britain were Peter Allen and Gwynne Evans on August 13, 1964. The two murdered van driver John West in Cumbria.
The UK has signed the European Convention on Human Rights), which prohibits restoring the death penalty.
But Mr Anderson said heinous crimes — such as the murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby in 2013 by extremists Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale — where the perpetrators are clearly identifiable should be punished by execution.
Adebolajo was given a whole-life term and Adebowale was jailed for a minimum of 45 years for running over and stabbing the British Army soldier in south-east London in broad daylight.
“Now I’d be very careful on that one [the return of the death penalty] because you’ll get the certain groups saying, ‘You can never prove it’," Mr Anderson told the magazine.
“Well, you can prove it if they have videoed it and are on camera, like the Lee Rigby killers.
“I mean, they should have gone, same week. I don’t want to pay for these people.”
UK coastguard responds to migrant emergency in English Channel - in pictures
On preventing small boats from crossing the Channel, which is one Mr Sunak’s top five priorities, Mr Anderson said migrants arriving unlawfully in Britain should be returned on the same day to where they came from.
He said that during a visit to Calais last month he met migrants referring to Britain as “El Dorado”.
“They are seeing a country where the streets are paved with gold – where, once you land, they are not in that manky little … scruffy tent,” Mr Anderson said.
“They are going to be in a four-star hotel. And they know that Serco is buying up houses everywhere, to put them in for the next five years. Why wouldn’t you come?
“I’d send them straight back the same day. I’d put them on a Royal Navy frigate or whatever and sail it to Calais, have a stand-off. And they’d just stop coming.”
The former miner said that, despite facing criticism in some quarters for his opinions, he found voters often agreed with him.
“If I say something that is supposedly outrageous in that place [the House of Commons], I get back to Ashfield on a Thursday, people will come out the shops and say, ‘You say what I’m thinking’,” Mr Anderson said.
“Maybe some of my colleagues think I’m a little bit too divisive, but I’m of the mind that half the population will hate you, whatever colour you wear.”
