Thursday, October 25, 2012

The simple joys of Opposition


I have posted before about the European Court of Human Rights' ruling on prisoners' votes and how British media and politicians have consistently misrepresented it.  Today the BBC reports that David Cameron told the house:
 "No one should be under any doubt - prisoners are not getting the vote under this government".   

The same report tells us that the Labour Opposition spokesman on Justice, Sadiq Khan, said: "
The public will be rightly concerned at reports prisoners could get a vote. If true, thousands of those serving sentences for serious and violent crimes such as wounding, assault and domestic violence would be given a say in who runs the country." 

Interestingly, in his speech to the Labour Party Conference  he attacks the Tories as saying:
 "Human Rights are bad because they’re European.
and then replies,:
 "But Winston Churchill and British lawyers wrote the European Convention on Human Rights, of which Britain should be proud".   
It's an interesting defence of the ECHR, because it amounts to saying:
"Don't worry, it's not really foreign, it's British."
I'm also not entirely sure which bits Winston Churchill wrote.

More recently, Sadiq Khan has also tweeted
"As today progressed, growing confusion between AG and PM over whether prisoners will or won’t get to vote shows Gvt is at sixes and sevens".   

So does he and does Labour support the ECHR and accept that we must abide by its rulings or not ?  Perhaps we'll never know.





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