I was listening to Jeremy Vine again today – I really should stop this, it does my blood pressure no good at all…
Anyway, the subject of discussion was David Lucas and his healthy trade in gallows equipment.
HUMAN rights campaigners have denounced a loophole in the law that is allowing a Suffolk farmer to sell gallows to Zimbabwe.
Amnesty International claimed David Lucas’ business “makes a mockery” of the UK’s efforts to oppose the death penalty around the world.
Its comments came after it emerged the Mildenhall farmer has been selling the execution equipment to countries with poor human rights records for around ten years, including Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.
Mr Lucas is unrepentant; stating that it is simply business and so what? My repugnance for capital punishment aside, there is some merit in his position – it is just business. Until, that is, you look a little more closely at both his justification and the regimes to whom he exports his mobile multi-person gallows. During the BBC interview, he stated that his equipment is used to despatch rapists and murderers and that this helps to control such people in third world countries.
“It isn’t a sick trade at all. Some people, they do not see the other side of things. If you take some of the things happening through the world at the moment, this is the only way to control it. There’s no control.”
Explaining what he meant by there being no control, he cited rapes and mass murders and said a gallows in a market square would make people “think twice about it”.
He added: “That’s how I think justice should be.”
However, Mr Lucas does not appear to have paid too much heed to the behaviour of the regimes in question; Iran, for example, where teenagers are executed because they are homosexual or the victims of rape. Or Zimbabwe where it is political dissidents who are subjected to summary execution by Mugabe’s thugs. Ah, but, it’s just business, so what if innocent people are murdered by these machines? At least they will be despatched quickly, and, look, you can knock off six at a time.
Sorry, it doesn’t wash. Mr Lucas is selling means of murder to brutal regimes with incompetent justice systems that are busily suppressing their populations; knocking the hapless victims off six at a time must be a god-send to them. It must save an awful lot of time and effort. This trade makes Mr Lucas complicit in mass murder; no matter how he tries to palliate his behaviour. Indeed, listening to his feeble attempts to justify himself, I’m reminded of the cognitive dissonance expressed in the testimony of those people who tried to dissociate themselves from their actions during the Holocaust.
Still, it seems that this sordid trade will cease on the 31st of July:
An Amnesty International spokesman told the BBC a new European Commission Trade Regulation, which comes into force on July 31, would make it unlawful to export gallows.
I guess Mr Lucas will have to manage on his farm subsidies once more.