Percy Daines - Capital Punishment

Capital Punishment

On foreign policy, Daines joined a group of left-wing Labour MPs in opposing the ending of the British mandate in Palestine without creating independent Jewish and Arab states in line with the United Nations partition plan. He supported a moratorium on capital punishment, and broke the whip to insist on disagreement with the House of Lords after the Government conceded to Lords opposition; he was later to be a sponsor of Sydney Silverman's bill to abolish the death penalty.

Daines was a witness in a 1948 libel action brought by Bessie Braddock over a story in the Bolton Evening News claiming she had "danced a jig on the floor of the House" in "a sorry degradation of democratic government"; he said that Braddock appeared to cross the floor of the House reluctantly (Braddock lost the case). He asserted that he was speaking for the Co-operative movement in April 1949 when he opposed the Agricultural Marketing Bill, which he described as 'capitalist-syndicalist'. Daines supported an amendment to remove the veto of the Parliament of Northern Ireland on eventual reunification of Ireland in May 1949, against the Government whip.