The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that Britain should allow prisoners the vote. I’ve always felt uncomfortable with denying prisoners the vote. It’s an arbitrary, petty and outdated gloss on the withdrawal of liberty and, worse, it grants unelected judges a quite inappropriate role in the democratic process. Taking the right to vote away from those who’ve already lost their liberty is incompatible with larger and older liberties that we should be more enthusiastically defending.
In which I try, after 25 years of blogging, to drop my ironic stance a bit.