Oral Answers to Questions

James Gray Excerpts

Tuesday 11th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[Mr James Gray (North Wiltshire) (Con)]

3. What discussions he has had with the Prison Service on arrangements to enable certain prisoners to vote.

[The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice (Mr Kenneth Clarke)]

Prisoners given the right to vote under the Government’s proposals will vote by post or proxy in the constituency of their normal residence. That is the basis on which prisoners on remand and prisoners convicted but unsentenced already vote under existing long-established procedures.

[Mr Gray]

If, as the Government propose, prisoners serving less than four years are given the vote, the vote will be given to 6,000 violent offenders, 2,000 sex offenders, 6,500 robbers and burglars, and 4,500 drug offenders, which any sensible person, including the Prime Minister, I think, would find wholly offensive and unacceptable. Does the Secretary of State agree that it should not be the European convention on human rights that decides matters but Parliament, and will he listen not to the lawyers but to other European countries such as Belgium, where the vote is given to prisoners serving up to four months? Let us make it four months—even better, four days; even better than that, four minutes.

[Mr Clarke]

I do not think that anyone in government, including my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister, is under any illusion about the popularity of the proposal to be introduced. We are under legal obligations which no one is suggesting we should repudiate. As I often had to explain when I practised law to dissatisfied litigants who had just lost a case that they would have preferred to win, one can get into more trouble if one seeks to define it. If my hon. Friend wishes really to enrage his constituents and mine, he runs the risk of taking a decision that will result in thousands of prisoners being given compensation for their lost rights and in tens of millions of pounds of expenditure incurred by the taxpayer. We are in government, I am afraid, as I often find myself saying to our Liberal Democrat colleagues, and we have to act responsibly, whatever our inner feelings about the wisdom of the judgment that has been reached in the Court whose jurisdiction we still accept.