Voting by Prisoners

Robert Buckland Excerpts

Thursday 10th February 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr Davis]

My hon. Friend faces this issue every time he votes on a Third Reading; if he has not noticed that yet, I am sorry for him. The truth is that there are two issues, both important, in my view, and both with enormous strength behind them. If he does not feel that he can vote on the motion, perhaps he should abstain.

The Court’s authority rests solely on the European convention on human rights, which is both the source of its power and the limit of its power. When Britain signed up to the European convention on human rights, it was to help to prevent a repeat of the horrors of the second world war and of Nazism, and, indeed, the horrors of the growing Soviet empire at that point in time; it was to protect people from ill-treatment, and to protect their life, liberty, free speech, and right to a fair trial. Those are all very serious and fundamental issues. What we emphatically did not sign up for was giving prisoners the right to vote.

[Mr Robert Buckland (South Swindon) (Con)]

Will my right hon. Friend give way?

[Mr Davis]

For the very last time.

[Mr Buckland]

Was not the convention called the charter of fundamental rights and freedoms at that time, and have we not lost the plot in terms of its development?

[Mr Davis]

My hon. Friend is right—he makes a very good point. The then Labour Government well understood this when they excluded from the text the words “universal suffrage”. They did that because although we have a very wide and general suffrage and a very democratic state, we do not have universal suffrage. The Strasbourg Court has imposed judgments on Britain that are outside the original treaty. We have signed a contract; it has gone beyond that contract.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Robert Buckland (South Swindon) (Con)]

We have had an interesting debate and a number of ideas have come forward from both the Front and, most notably, Back Benches. In the spirit of the invitation of the Attorney-General, who made his remarks in the middle of the debate, I think that it is incumbent on us all to come up with constructive suggestions on how we move forward. Before doing so, I want to say that the debate epitomises the age-old tension between the judiciary and the legislature. It is not something we should apologise for; frankly, it is entirely natural.

There are times when the concept that politicians make the laws and judges merely enforce them comes under severe strain, and this is one such occasion. Often, the fault lies here, with politicians, because of poor and unclear drafting of legislation. Judges will often have the difficult task of interpreting unclear provisions—I pray in aid the Criminal Justice Act 2003, for example—and will do their best to clear up the spilt milk that we politicians have left them. However, there are times when the hand of judicial activism can be seen. Nowhere is that more true, I am afraid, than in the European Court of Human Rights.

We have heard much about the original conception of fundamental rights and freedoms, and I associate myself with those remarks. What has clearly occurred is a move from a concept of the guardianship of fundamental liberty to one of pettifogging interference with the mechanisms of liberty itself.

[Robert Halfon]

Will my hon. Friend give way?

[Mr Buckland]

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.