“We’re killing all the right people, and we’re cutting your taxes”. So said Senator Lindsey Graham, to whoops and cheers, at the recent Annual Leadership Summit organised by the Republican Jewish Coalition. A children’s computer game called Fortnite — rated 12 — enables players to kill each other’s characters, and there is no minimum age for creating an account. On X, the Israel Defense Forces and the Defense of Ukraine accounts regularly show what are, essentially, snuff movies. Both organisations are supported overtly and covertly by His Majesty’s Government, using your money.
Senator Lindsey Graham (USA): Killing all the right people?
UK Column has given a very thorough treatment to the various assisted suicide bills of the twenty-first century. It was in 1936 that Lord Ponsonby told the House of Lords that his Voluntary Euthanasia Bill was not just “supported by a few cranks and people of no account”. To qualify his statement, he name-dropped — among others — Julian Huxley and H. G. Wells. Huxley was president of the Eugenics Society from 1959 to 1962. Wells was a member of the same society and had been a vocal supporter of the Feeble-Minded Persons (Control) Bill of 1912. It is, by the way, still against the law to encourage another to commit suicide: as clarified by Section 2 of the Suicide Act 1961.
With the scent of death never far from the nostrils of the public, is it any wonder that a process of mass desensitisation appears to be running — continually — in the background? With this is mind, it is time to examine a coincidence that can only be described as remarkable. On 10 November 2025, Israel’s Knesset approved the first reading of the Penal Bill (Amendment No. 159) (Death Penalty for Terrorists), 2025, just a day ahead of Rupert Lowe MP calling for the reintroduction of the death penalty in the United Kingdom. Neither event was given much attention at the time and, despite the best efforts of GB News and Talk, Lowe remains a nonentity as the ‘leader’ of the nascent political movement Restore Britain.
On the Restore Britain website, Lowe makes a series of bold ‘promises’ which, in all likelihood, will remain unchallenged by the requirement to form a government. The BBC would likely describe them as ‘populist’: “Low tax, small state, slash immigration, protect British culture … carpet-bomb the cancer of wokery, fight lawfare, empower individual enterprise, and plenty more.” Given that he is now calling for the death penalty, the apparent intent of “restoring Christian principles” is somewhat discordant; or at least more aligned to the Old Testament. No sooner had Lowe told his fellow parliamentarians that the answer to many of the country’s problems was more death, he took to X to tell his followers that the “British people would vote for the reintroduction of the death penalty”.
Restore Britain — currently a one-man band — had commissioned a poll on the subject, and it was the results of this which Lowe was referring to. In fact, Restore Britain asserts (in bold capitals) that “The majority of the British public would vote in favour of restoring the death penalty at a referendum”. The more than 45 million adults who do live in the UK have been spoken for by one thousand respondents due to a process of ‘weighting’ which is, apparently, “nationally representative by age, gender, region and 2024 General Election”. Extrapolation from shaky foundations never seemed to do Neil Ferguson and Chris Whitty any harm, but Lowe has wilfully misrepresented what is, ostensibly, his own data.
Find Out Now ran the poll, to which there was no nuance at all, making it unlikely that many of the participants were able to grasp the depth of the issue. That aside, suggesting that 60% of those polled would vote in favour of restoring the death penalty is an outright lie. Before we get into that, it must be noted that only 41% of the participants thought there should even be a referendum on the matter, with 25% agreeing that they “don’t know”. You’ll be there already, but that’s just 411 Brits in 1,000 who think that this issue should be brought to a national vote.
If, from such a small sample, any of the results can be described as ‘interesting’ (if not particularly surprising) it is that the only subsets in favour of the death penalty and with returns of over 60% are ‘Age 75+’ and ‘Reform UK’. To return to the ‘lie’, Lowe has removed the ‘I would not vote’ and ‘I don’t know’ categories for an “adjusted question 2”. This shows 60% of the filtered respondents indicating that they would vote for in favour of the death penalty. In actual fact, this is 60% of just 737 people, which comes out to 442, certainly not a ‘majority’ of the total of those polled. So, another politician has told a whopper: does it matter?
Now would be the time to return to Jerusalem. From the Penal Bill’s explanatory notes, “This penalty will serve as a deterrent and will be able to prevent further acts of murder from being committed”. In essence, this is the same line that Rupert Lowe is attempting to walk. However, one need not draw the drapes much further back to get the full picture. Whilst consensus has it that slightly more than a quarter of Israel’s population is not Jewish, the commentary around this bill makes it abundantly clear that this concerns Jews and their enemies, rather than all Israelis. Member of the Knesset Tzvika Foghel is quoted as saying, “This is a historic moment. Whoever comes to murder Jews from hatred of the State of Israel — will bear the consequences.” As the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights put it: “This bill marks a dangerous shift in Israeli policy by seeking to legally enshrine the systematic state-sanctioned killing of Palestinian detainees”.
The connections between Rupert Lowe’s push for the death penalty and that of the Israeli Knesset extend beyond mere timing. Since October 2023, Lowe’s support for the actions of the Israeli state might be described as ‘staunch’. In the face of the mainstream narrative and the approved version of the events of 7 October 2023, this may not be particularly surprising. What is of note, and must not be ignored, is Lowe’s apparent antipathy toward Muslims, and Palestinians in particular. Twitter — as was — provides a handy record. Rupert Lowe is not just continually insistent that we “stand with Israel”, he goes far further by declaring that any person from Gaza presents a danger to the United Kingdom. How or why, he does not tell.
By ‘tweeting’ what he thinks, Lowe betrays his support for what is being investigated as genocide by the International Court of Justice and as crimes against humanity and war crimes by the International Criminal Court. He does not stop there, going on to state that: “Not a single Gazan migrant should be allowed on British soil.” Whether by design or by accident — and there is little to suggest the latter — Lowe’s position is manna for the Israel lobby. Ironically, given his posturing on other matters, this makes him a bedfellow of one former British Prime Minister in particular.
For a man culpable for incalculable loss of life across much of the Middle East and Afghanistan (in particular), it looks paradoxical that it was Tony Blair who did away with capital punishment in the United Kingdom. 1998 was a busy year. The Human Rights Act stated that “The death penalty shall be abolished. No one shall be condemned to such penalty or executed.” The Crime and Disorder Act of the same year updated the Treason Act (Ireland) 1537 so that one guilty of the offence would no longer “have and suffer such pains of death” but, rather, “be liable to imprisonment for life and to such”. In the rest of the United Kingdom, no more would “such person … be hanged by the neck until such person be dead” under the Treason Act 1814. Murderous pirates who, under the Piracy Act 1837 “being convicted thereof shall suffer death”, were off the hook too. It is often said of Blair that the amendment to the Treason Act was a move concerned with self-preservation, given what he must have known he would go on to do. However, when set alongside the fact that the HRA could not very well prohibit capital punishment if the Treason Act still allowed it, this theory becomes rather leaky.
As an aside, The Crime and Disorder Act 1988 provides a sound example of how legislation creeps and creeps. It updates the stop and search power given to police by Section 60 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994, on the specific issue of ‘concealing identity’. Police are empowered to request anyone to remove an article which they may use to conceal their identity, or to seize the same. The current Crime and Policing Bill aims to renovate this by actually criminalising the wearing of an item which could conceal identity, inside an area designated by police.
To return to the specific issue, Restore Britain does not yet have a ‘Policy Proposal’ on health, or on international humanitarian law, which means that no regard is given — formally at least — to Article 12 of the Geneva Conventions 1949. The Article refers to the “Protection and care of the wounded and the sick”, responsibility for which falls to “the Party to the conflict in whose power they may be”. Whilst improbable that Tony Blair or Rupert Lowe would concede the point, it may be argued that the United Kingdom is a de facto party in the conflict in Gaza. Quite apart from the rhetoric, the posturing, and the absolute failure to attempt to limit the activities of the state of Israel, the UK has been sharing “surveillance” data with Israel and retains no control over the use of that information, as reported by Declassified UK in August of this year.
The death penalty divides opinion, as it has done throughout time. At the present moment, calling for it looks intended to divide society yet further. This was no coincidence, and death is not the answer. The space occupied by peace just got a bit narrower, and it turns out that it does matter when a British politician lies.
Cover Image: For Whom The Bell Tolls. Patrick Rock, 2015. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported licence.
