David Cameron will presumably be spending today retching into a bucket at his Oxfordshire home. Having said that the thought of prisoners voting made him ‘physically sick’, he will not be pleased by the Government’s proposal to grant the vote to the hundred or so prisoners who are out of jail at any one time – this in reaction to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), which ruled that a blanket ban on prisoners’ voting is a breach of human rights.
It is pretty par for the course for the ECHR – standing up for criminals while failing to do much to ensure free speech in Russia and so on. But why the Government’s drawn-out battle to resist what would be a pretty small and unimportant change to the prison regime? At the cost of further stirring the contents of the Cameron tummy why not be done with it and grant all prisoners the right to vote?
What is the government scared of? That Ian Huntley and his fellow lifers are going to set up a political party which succeeds in legalising murder? If there were a constituency of Dartmoor Central the prisoner vote might just conceivably swing a tight election, but in reality there are no practical consequences from giving prisoners the vote.
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