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Voting by Prisoners

I thank the hon. Lady for that point, because it brings me to the second matter of principle that I want to talk about, but I do not want to get into the dangerous territory of discussing rights and freedoms. I am trying to explain why I believe that voting is traditionally a freedom in this country, not a right. That is in part why we have got into this mess. Taking the European Court of Human Rights on its own terms, those Members who have looked at the comments of the dissenting judges will know that they are very telling. The main point of dissent is that protocol 1 of article 3 is not a substantive individual right. It is one that forced contracting states to provide free and fair elections, but the bounds by which the states make those decisions are left to them. What worries me, as I said earlier, is the encroachment of jurisprudential evolution on the Court's decision making, which is changing the nature of the convention. It is not the convention that is at fault, but the Court. Here we come to the key point, because the reason we have to listen to the Court's judgment, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bury St Edmunds (Mr Ruffley) so rightly pointed out, is that the Wilson Government decided in 1967 to allow petitioning in person to the European Court and for its decisions to hold force of law in this country. That changes entirely our relationship with the convention. The problem is with the Court, not with the convention, and that is not my point but one that Lord Hoffmann has made with far greater eloquence and force. There is a subsidiary point, which has been brought up several times in the debate, about the rightness of decisions. The hon. Member for Rhondda (Chris Bryant) is entirely correct that the shameful denial of service by homosexuals in the military was wrong, but the fact that the European Court judged it to be wrong does not make the existence of the Court itself right. It is right that we reflect on the ability of this House to make the right decision at the right time, even if other courts prompt us to do so. I shall make quickly two other points about the political issues and why we need to face the matter now. First, I yield to no one in my passion for penal reform, rather like my hon. Friend the Member for Devizes (Claire Perry). I am a proud patron of the Longford Trust, and, with the fantastic plans that the Lord Chancellor has laid before the House, we are about to embark on the most significant period of penal reform since the era of Lord Shaftesbury; but, in what will be a remarkable period of reform and release for some of the most vulnerable people in our community, we will lose the public's confidence if we start off on this footing. Secondly, I have many problems with the European Union and I disagreed with the Lisbon treaty, but the simple fact is that many people—a majority both in this House and on the Government Benches—believe in this country's continued membership of the European Union. This debate makes it impossible to have a clean debate about the European Union, however, because too many people understand the EU and the European Court of Human Rights to be the same thing. For those reasons, in principle and in politics, I shall support the motion.