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The government is right to suggest some compromise on the issue of prisoners' voting rights and sensible MPs should support this. However this won't happen for three reasons. The Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph and the Sun. Our off-shore owned populist press now has more sway on public policy than MPs, think-tanks and most government departments.
To resume. For a number of years the view has taken hold amongst those who see prison as a process of rehabilitation and not revenge that prisoners should be able to take part in activities that they would undertake if not deprived of liberty. They can write novels, become good at sport, study for degrees, and towards the end of their sentence be released on a tagged basis. In some countries there are conjugal visits. The fact is that the fewer the number of prisoners and the better they are treated the lower the level of crime.
Therefore as we want all citizens - those at liberty and those temporarily deprived thereof - to be active in citizenship why not let them vote as well. Other countries have adopted this position. Switzerland, for example, has allowed prisoners to vote for more than 40 years. France takes a different position. A judge can add to a prison sentence a forfeiture of civic rights as an additional penalty in the case of serious crimes.
This satisfies the European Court of Human Rights. I suggested this compromise to various home and justice Secretaries as well as the attorney general, Dominic Grieve. At the time they pooh-poohed the proposal and said judges did not want to alter their system of sentencing.
That seemed a specious argument though it is true that judges do seem to be a law unto themselves. Now the government has come up with a sensible compromise based on allowing voting rights for sentences of fewer than four years.
But there are still many MPs who still want to get on their chargers, lower their lances and tilt at full speed against the European Court of Human Rights. They are encouraged in this by the off-shore owned tabloid press. The Daily Telegraph today says that again Brussels is imposing its unwanted diktat on Britain. Clearly the Telegraph's proprietors have a map of the Channel islands where they live but someone might give the paper's editor a map of Europe where he can find out that the European Court of Human Rights is in Strasbourg and has nothing to do with Brussels or the EU.
Again it seems necessary to repeat that the European Convention on Human Rights and its court was set up as a post-war British initiative and has served the cause of human rights and democracy well. Asia, Africa and the Americas would benefit from having such a Court to poke its nose into big and small abuses of human rights norms in non-European countries.
To be sure, it has been uncomfortable for successive British governments to be called to order in Strasbourg. On torture of interned prisoners in Ulster in the 1970s, on paedophilic beatings of small children in schools, on gay rights it has been the Court nudging Britain to a better place even if tabloid and populist politicians were hostile at the time.
Dominic Raab, the Tory MP, led a fine campaign in the Commons over the scandal of the brutal treatment and killing in a Russian prison of the British linked lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky. But like so many Tories he is good on human rights in another nation but nervous of upholding them at home, especially at the instigation of a body with the name 'European' in it.
He is quite wrong to assume that the ECHR having come after years of deliberation to its view that prisoners can be allowed some voting rights will now back down any more than it backs down on human rights questions in other countries under its jurisdiction like Russian or Turkey.
Of course, the UK can leave the Council of Europe and withdraw from the ECHR and the court. But no British government can seriously contemplate this. There will be much frothing about the government's pragmatic decision. It should be backed and MPs should move on to other business.
Follow Denis MacShane on Twitter: www.twitter.com/DenisMacShane
The right to vote could be treated in the same way as a spent conviction, once a suitable amount of time has passed they no longer have to declare said conviction, that's when they get back their right to vote.
Prison is supposed to be a deterrent, not a combination of college, Club Med and hotel!
The population at large accept that prisoners do not lose all of their human rights once they are incarcerated. They should not be starved for example, or beaten.
However, it is also accepted that there are some rights that should be removed. The right to freedom of movement, for example. And, despite the decision after “years of deliberation” of the worthies in Strasbourg, most people in this fair land put the right to vote in the same category.
Unlike Cameron, the prospect of criminals getting the vote does not make me feel physically sick. However, the cheerleaders for the idea that it should be demanded as an inalienable human right, with their lazy jokes about The Daily Mail etc, do make me feel a bit bilious.
So if you didn't imprison people who would otherwise commit a crime, the level of crime would drop??
My personal view is that we should go with what we know works rather than expose society to nice-sounding but dodgy experiments.
Prisoners should be made to work for their keep, lifting the burden from taxpayers. Then if they want to improve themselves they do it in their remaining time like most adults do when improving their education. As they decided to attack society, the can't really expect society to give them the right to vote for the way in which that society is run.
Personally i'm not swayed by any of the above who are usually in it for the benefit of selling themselves .
As most of the public have been victims of at least one crime I'd say most of the public dont feel like giving prisoners anymore rights that they already enjoy. Which many too would argue have far more than they should have. There should be better alternatives to prison and perhaps these think tanks and mp's should get together and come up with working solutions to let more petty criminals try and make amends for their crimes that would benefit society instead of costing us a same fortune . Locking them up all day with playstations isnt doing anything to solve the problems .
For many centuries the world has been using many, some very barbaric, means of execution as a deterrant to murder and they have failed to stop man killing his neighbour.
Similarlly, the cofinement of individuals breaching the ever changing limits of publicly acceptable behaviour, has been proved to be of questionable value to society.
The think-tanks should be putting their effort into finding the root cause of the envy that makes a person covet somebody else's possessions and rectify that.
Maybe a prisoner's M.P. would resolve the issue. All prisons would form one constituency.