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Voting by Prisoners

I am not a lawyer, which I think might be helpful in this debate. As we heard earlier, a lot of the lawyers in the Chamber and in Her Majesty's Government are over-complicating this issue, which I believe is quite straightforward. It is the settled view of the British people, through their elected representatives in the British Parliament, that prisoners should not have the right to vote, and it has been that way since 1870. Everyone understands and accepts that—it is one of those issues that, in modern parlance, has cut through. My role here, as an ordinary, humble Back Bencher, is to represent the views of my constituents. My constituents do not want sentenced prisoners to have the right to vote. If I walked down Kettering High street and asked shoppers whether that was a sensible policy, the overwhelming majority would say, ““That is absolutely right, and Her Majesty's Government should not be trying to change the law.”” We were told by Her Majesty's Government not so long ago that they had to agree to the judgment of the Court and that the minimum they could do was to limit this right to prisoners sentenced to four years or less. The consequences of that are absolutely appalling. There are 28,770 prisoners serving sentences of less than four years: 5,900 for violence against the person, 1,753 for sexual offences, 2,500 for robbery, more than 4,000 for burglary, and almost 4,500 for drug offences. My constituents in Kettering do not want those people to have the right to vote.