Brekkin the law! Brekkin the law!

About an hour ago, 234 elected MPs voted to break the law. They were opposed by just 22. The vote concerned prisoner voting. For a bit of context: The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that there cannot be a blanket ban on giving votes to prisoners. As it currently stands, all prisoners in British prisons do not have the right, which places us in contravention of the law.  The ruling handed down does not say that all prisoners should be able to vote, just that there should not be a total ban, and that each case should be taken on it's merits. Ace legal blogger David Allen Green, who knows infinitely more about this than I do, which may make it a bad idea to link to him, writes that there is a similarity between this and bail. He says, 'There is no general ban on an arrested or convicted person applying for bail. It may well be refused, and it usually is in respect of serious offences, but there is no blanket prohibition'. And the same should apply here. The lib dems, who I bloody voted for, had prisoner voting in their manifesto but I suppose that doesn't really count for much these days.


What riles me most is the sheer arrogance of the idea that the government, if it doesn't like one of the rulings to which they are legally bound, can just vote against it in the Commons and hope it will go away. It won't. If they continue to impose a blanket ban, each prisoner will be able to sue the government for infringing upon their human rights. Would they prefer that? It's easy to imagine what the press would make of rapists and paedophiles getting compensation because the loony European Court says so. But it wouldn't be Strasbourg's fault, it would be the fault of the MPs from all parties who, in trying to prevent lawbreakers from voting, have broken the law themselves..


Anyway, enough of that. In other news, I still have no job, which I imagine is becoming less newsworthy with each blog. But hey ho, never mind, I'll get one eventually. It's the waiting that blows.


In my copious spare moments I've been reading Bill Bryson's new book - At Home. It's really really good, like the Brief History of Nearly Everything he did, but based around domesticity and the home. He'll start talking about hallways, then branch off into a huge tract of history and biography. Capability Brown seems like a really cool dude, and I'd only vaguely heard of him before reading this. It's a trivia-addict's dream.