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4 August 2026 - 7:00am
Capital punishment, that perennial staple of sixth-form debates, is back on the electoral agenda. Restore Britain’s Rupert Lowe announced last weekend that he was willing to negotiate with Nigel Farage and Reform UK to unite the two Right-wing parties, with a referendum on the death penalty key to his list of demands.
That, in itself, is unsurprising. Lowe has been a vocal campaigner on the issue, having raised it previously in Parliament, and has used the topic to successfully position himself to Reform’s Right. Yet while Farage has stated that he is “open-minded” about a deal, the Reform leader stated just last year that “nothing on the death penalty will be part of party policy” and, due to historic miscarriages of justice, “I don’t think I could ever support it.”
That attitude represents a minority opinion in his own party. In 2025, Reform MP Lee Anderson publicly called for the return of hanging after Axel Rudakubana murdered three girls in Southport. Meanwhile, Reform’s prisons tsar Vanessa Frake, herself a former prison governor, last week said she would back the death penalty’s restoration, having only last year questioned its value as a deterrent and urged that criminals instead stay behind bars.
Farage may now find himself under increasing pressure to have a similar change of heart. Lowe has long supported the death penalty, but did so as a backbencher under Farage’s leadership. While past feuds and early online skirmishes suggest that coalition talks will be dogged by personal tensions, Lowe now leads a rival outfit that is pulling votes — and attention — away from Reform. That gives him a stronger hand to press Farage into reconsidering his stance. Lowe is also standing firm on the issue, yesterday posting that a referendum will be a Restore manifesto commitment.
Pressure from Lowe and Reform MPs is one thing; electoral arithmetic is another. If capital punishment seems a settled debate, it isn’t. Public support has risen to 55%, while 82% of Reform voters and 67% of Conservatives are in favour, making the issue particularly difficult for Farage to ignore.
Farage has himself acknowledged the changing mood. Last year, he admitted it was “quite interesting” to see a younger generation increasingly supportive of the death penalty, predicting that it could return as “an issue of major national debate” within the next decade. That marked a shift from 2021, when he rejected the prospect of restoring capital punishment for first-degree murder on the basis that a referendum would not pass, saying there has been a “generational shift” and “an older generation it appeals to; a younger one it doesn’t”. If that calculation is changing, so too may Farage’s position, and a growing interest among those younger parts of the electorate could sway him.
But if Lowe does get his referendum into Reform’s next manifesto, what then? Any attempt to bring back the death penalty would run headlong into Britain’s international treaty obligations. The UK remains a member of the European Convention on Human Rights, Protocol 13 of which prohibits capital punishment in all circumstances, including wartime. Conveniently for Lowe, both the Conservatives and Reform advocate leaving the ECHR, potentially clearing the way for a fundamental obstacle to be removed.
For the Reform leader, the question now may no longer be whether the death penalty belongs in the debate, but whether keeping it out will mean shedding further votes to his Right, and potentially cost him an election.
