Members of the UK Conservative Party on Thursday distanced themselves from the words of their newly appointed ‘number two’, Lee Anderson, over his stance on the death penalty.
The formation has thus stressed that the words of Anderson, who has been appointed deputy chairman of the party by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, do not represent the position of the British government on the issue and is his personal opinion.
The controversy has been generated as a result of statements made by Anderson during an interview with the newspaper ‘Spectator’ in which he defends the death penalty – abolished in 1960 in the United Kingdom – since there is no need to focus on the reintegration of offenders.
«No one has committed a crime once they’ve been executed, you know that, don’t you? It has a one hundred percent success rate,» said the Conservative politician, known precisely for his controversial views, according to reports in the Guardian.
In this sense, he has defended that on some occasions it can be clearly demonstrated that someone has committed a crime. «You can prove it if it has been recorded, as in the case of Lee Rigby,» he said in relation to the British soldier killed on May 22, 2013 when he was run over by two men who then tried to decapitate him.
«They should have disappeared, I don’t want to pay for those people,» he insisted, despite the fact that restoring the death penalty is not among the political proposals of the Tories and, in case of reintroducing it, it would imply the country’s exit from the European Convention on Human Rights.
Both the formation and the Government have criticized Anderson’s words and have stressed that the interview, although it has been published this Thursday, was made before he took office as ‘number two’ of the party.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
