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Voting by Prisoners

I will not, because other hon. Members wish to speak, and I do not want to eat into their time. In this country, the concept of human rights has become associated not with the far-sighted words of Sir Winston Churchill or the careful drafting of Lord Kilmuir, but with the rather grisly spectre of ambulance-chasing lawyers, scuttling around our prisons, encouraging inmates to think not about the right to vote, but about the prospect of compensation. We should all reflect on that; it is a sad reflection of where human rights have sunk to in the public's perception. We need to return to the concept of basic rights. The right to vote is not in my view a fundamental freedom of itself. It is the expression of a freedom, of a constitutional right, but it is not of itself a fundamental human right. The suffrage is age-restricted, for example; it depends on electoral registration; and it is a mechanism for expressing our freedom, not the very freedom itself. That is where I am afraid the hon. Member for Solihull (Lorely Burt) gets it wrong. There is a distinction to be made, but it is a distinction that the European Court has blurred—and blurred dangerously through its majority decision in the case of Hirst. I said that the right to vote is an ancillary to freedom, and equally the loss of the right to vote by a prisoner is an ancillary consequence of incarceration. The punishment is the deprivation of the fundamental freedom that is liberty; one consequence is the loss of the right to vote. They go hand in hand, and the eloquent words of my hon. Friend the Member for Ipswich (Ben Gummer) cannot be improved on. Much has been said about the misnomer of a ““blanket ban””, and that point needs to be reinforced. I should like to make a suggestion, which I think my hon. Friend the Member for Broxtowe (Anna Soubry) presaged, but whom I forgive. It is an observation based on the majority decision in the Hirst case. The criteria that troubled the majority there were the nature or gravity of the offence and the individual circumstances. We should move away from worrying about the length of the sentence and look at where we deal with the case. We deal with our most serious cases in the Crown court, and there should be a presumption of the loss of the right to vote for all defendants who are dealt with in that higher court. We could observe the reverse to be true in the lower or magistrates court. I am reluctant to support the concept of judicial discretion, which brings judges into the political sphere and leads to an effective reduction in the loss of the right to vote. For all those reasons, I support the motion.