Although starting your own country might seem pretty straightforward – get yourself a flag, a National Anthem and a few citizens and away you go - I can tell you it’s not. As a king and a leader to an ever-growing population you’ve got to be ready to make difficult decisions: decisions that sometimes your citizens might disagree with. This is particularly true when it comes to crime and punishment, and the highly emotive topic of capital punishment.

In the UK, capital punishment has taken many forms. Everything from crucifixion, beheading, drowning, being hung drawn and quartered, and burning at the stake has been tried, but the most popular form was hanging. At its height there were over two hundred and fifty crimes that were punishable by death including damaging Westminster Bridge, impersonating a Chelsea Pensioner and cutting down a young tree.

Over the years more and more crimes where removed from this list and in 1969 murder finally got the axe. However, it wasn’t until 1999 when the 6th Protocol of the European Convention on Human Rights was ratified that all provisions for the death penalty were finally abolished in the UK.

Despite its abolition recent surveys have revealed that as many as 70% of the British population still believe that the death sentence is sometimes justified. That’s a lot of people who want to bring back the hangman! On the basis that a large part of my population are made up of ex-British citizens you can begin to see my problem.

To be frank if I do what a seemingly large part of my population want, and introduce the death penalty, then all of a sudden this is not a country I want to be a part of anymore. These kind of decisions really define a country.

So I have reached the decision that in my country there will be no death penalty and for those that disagree I would suggest that you go back to being a British citizen or perhaps you should think about emigrating to America, where 38 states still maintain the death penalty on their statute books.