An ingenious man, John Hirst. First he achieved the considerable feat of committing
manslaughter with an axe; and he has since proceeded to cause governments no end of trouble. The prisoner voting saga is nearing its end and a fug of ignominy is descending on the government.
The BBC reports that the coalition is to dilute its policy of enfranchising prisoners serving less than four years. Now ministers will be seeking to enfranchise only those serving a year or less. This u-turn is the result of the alliance between Jack Straw and David Davis and the slew of assorted backbench dissent. Tim Montgomerie argues that this is yet another example of Downing Street’s inability to communicate with the parliamentary Tory party. That is so, but the government has been placed in an invidious position by the ECHR. Virtually no one in Britain wants to enfranchise prisoners with the exception of politicised lags, a smattering of Liberal Democrats and the swelling phalanx of human rights lawyers.
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