Universal Suffrage

Tomorrow morning MPs will debate the possibility of prisoners in the UK being enfranchised, a prospect that the Prime Minister has admitted makes him feel "physically sick."

I'm interested in why the prospect of extending suffrage to the prison population provokes such strong reactions, and why the argument that prisoners are denied their human rights as a result is so readily derided.

The revulsion that the prospect seems to provoke seems to stem from the idea that those who violate society's codes of conduct should be denied the capacity to participate in shaping society's values and laws by being allowed to cast votes to elect lawmakers. Is it really so nauseating an idea that those who have committed crimes be permitted to vote?

I would argue quite the contrary, and go so far as to say that denying suffrage to criminals is the only nauseating feature of the debate. Universal suffrage, that is the freedom of all to determine the means by which they will collectively be governed should be the basis of a free and fair society. Once it was the untitled and the unwashed who were excluded from the electoral process. At the beginning of the last century, the vote was still tied to property ownership and in 1928, finally 'universal suffrage for all' became a feature of the UK electoral process. Yet a blanket ban dating from the 1870s endures to this day, apparently overriding the legislature passed since, and ignoring the enshrinement of universal suffrage for all in Article 21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), in 1948.

By denying suffrage to the prison population we remove those convicted from the electoral process and from society; and more disturbingly, remove their human right to participate in government. It is not for us to pick and choose which rights we will choose to extend to different individuals. We must remember, that according to Article 2 of the UDHR, every right must be extended to everybody without any exceptions.

Deriding the argument from human rights sets a dangerous precedent, and undermines the value of those rights in our society. By ignoring Article 2 in this case, can we assume that it will never be ignored in other cases? Only by adhering to the value of human rights in all cases, regardless of any personal gall we may feel about doing so can we protect the fundamental dignity that all humans ought to enjoy.

Furthermore, lawmakers eager to exclude prisoners from the electoral process demean the meaning of democracy in our society, and serve only to degrade the validity of their own positions. Only an election conducted under true universal suffrage should be classed as a valid expression of a society's democratic will; which is another issue altogether.