The Courier & Advertiser (Angus and Dundee)
Tayside MP campaigned to save death penalty
ANNIVERSARY: Old Firm cited in bid to halt abolition 50 years ago today
Five decades ago today a Tayside politician brought Old Firm giants Rangers and Celtic into a fight to stop the death penalty being scrapped.
Dundee West Labour MP Peter Doig was accused of suggesting capital punishment would “prevent punch-ups at football matches” during the lengthy vote to end hanging in Britain.
The seven-and-a-half-hour debate in the House of Commons is being remembered exactly 50 years to the day since MPS voted by 343 to 185 to support abolition.
Between 1800 and 1868, a total of 273 people were hanged in Scotland but by the end of that century executions took place behind prison walls.
Of these executions, five took place in Dundee in public, and one, the last to be performed in the city, was carried out in private in 1889.
The 20th Century saw 34 people hanged across the country, all for the crime of murder.
The last man hanged in Scotland was Henry John Burnett, who was sentenced to death by the High Court in Aberdeen for the murder of merchant seaman Thomas Guyanat and was executed in 1963 at Aberdeen Prison, aged 21.
Hanging was suspended for an experimental period of five years under the terms of the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965 before the home secretary, James Callaghan, proposed a motion to make it permanent.
Mr Doig told the historic debate: “Is there not a price that we should be prepared to pay to preserve our individual freedom?
“This is what is now in danger. “A spectacle that has now become a bit of a joke is the match between Rangers and Celtic in Glasgow. But it is not a joke. It is a serious business.
“People who genuinely want to see the football match are deterred from going because of the danger involved in attending.
“It is next to committing suicide if somebody standing at the Celtic end of the ground advertises the fact that he supports the Rangers, and the same applies in reverse.”
Mr Doig’s passionate belief in capital punishment was just one of the issues which led him into a collision course with the increasingly left-wing Labour movement in Dundee.
Bradford Labour MP Edward Lyons asked: “Is my Honourable Friend suggesting that bringing back the death penalty will prevent punch-ups at football matches?”
“I am suggesting that people should be prepared to preserve individual freedom and to pay the price, just as apparently people are prepared to pay a price to preserve national or international freedom,” Mr Doig replied.
“I am giving some examples of how the freedom of the individual is being eroded often through fear and lack of respect for the law.”
Mr Doig saw himself very much as a man of the people and thought of himself as a person the voters could see as their friend.