People power can work in many ways. Not always in ways I like. There has been an effective e-petition to get Parliament to discuss re-introducing the death penalty. Thousands upon thousands have signed it. Why? Britain has one of the lowest murder rates in the world – 1.2 per hundred thousand of population, compared to El Salvador with 71 (yes seventy one) per hundred thousand, Iceland with zero or the country we seem to always look to as an example to follow, the United States, which has almost five times the murder rate we have in Britain. If the logic is that the death penalty acts as a deterrent, then it is plain that is has little or no effect: El Salvador and the United States have the death penalty, Iceland hasn't. In fact, of the 40 countries with the highest murder rates, 19 have the death penalty. Of the 40 countries with the lowest murder rates 10 have the death penalty and of these, only Japan is a non-muslim country. Of 188 countries in the world, 70 still retain the death penalty and of those only Japan, South Korea and the United States are of 'the developed world' (as defined by the Human Development Index). No European country has the death penalty. Surely we cannot permit our society to return to behaviour that lowers us to the same moral level as the criminals. We, as a society, are too good for that. I suggest that we make it plain to our MPs that if there is support for bringing back the death penalty, there is a lot more support to keep it away.