Prisoners do not deserve the vote

At least one of the Sunday papers is reporting that the European Court of Human Rights will declare our next General Election "illegal" unless the Government bows to its Human Rights judgement that prisoners - or at least certain categories of prisoners - are given the right to vote. It is precisely this sort of idiotic interference that fuels anti-European sentiment in this country.

To present the full picture here, the European Court is ruling only that "blanket bans" on voting are illegal. But this is just as absurd: the drafting of legislation to spell out which types of sentence deserve the loss of the franchise and which do not is of course exactly the type of legal minefield that keeps Human Rights lawyers in the lifestyle they've become accustomed to - and which most of the victims of crime can only dream of.

The European Court of Human Rights does not seem to comprehend that incarceration for criminal action should not be the be-all and end-all of their punishment: it entails other losses, including the right to participate in the democratic process for the duration of a sentence. There is no case, to my mind, for a murderer sentenced to life imprisonment to be treated any differently from a burgler sentenced to four or five months. Both should lose the vote for the duration of their sentence.

There is not the slightest thing wrong with this - and believing so is not "pandering to the tabloids", or "populist electioneering": it's a fundamental principle that has existed in our country since 1870. The only argument I have read in justification of giving votes to prisoners is from the Prison Reform Trust that claims that giving prisoners the vote encourages their rehabilitation. Utter nonsense.

For the European Court to equate human rights as giving the right to vote to prisoners just shows how grotesquely out of touch the EU and its unaccountable bureaucrats (which include its judges) are. And while I respect the work the Prison Reform Trust undertakes, on this issue they are misguided and out of touch.

The Government is right to resist this nonsense.