Euroscepticism and penal populism in the British Parliament: Parliamentary debates on the prisoners’ right to vote

The issue of prisoners’ right to vote has been a bone of contention between the UK and the European Court of Human Rights ever since the 2005 Hirst decision when the Court decided that the blanket ban on prisoners voting was a violation of Protocol 1 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The European origin of the decision was especially grating for many British politicians, and very quickly a bipartisan rejection of it arose in the UK Parliament. The ECtHR’s decision came under harsh criticism from all governments between then and 2022, as well as from the press. The criticism often focused on the perceived erosion of the UK Parliament’s sovereignty and revolved around the question of whether the right to vote for prisoners should be seen as a fundamentally national issue of penal policy, or as an international human rights issue. This article will explore political parliamentary discourse on this issue through a qualitative analysis of debates in the House of Commons on the Hirst decision and subsequent attempts at legal reforms. During this twelve-year-long standoff, politicians in the House of Commons often took up the issue as a way to signal their Euroscepticism, frequently conflating the Council of Europe and the EU. Many arguably engaged in a form of penal populism, pitting “law-abiding citizens” against convicted criminals (an unpopular minority) protected by “elite” foreign judges. For the three main parties, the issue could either represent a convenient diversion from their internal divisions on Brexit, or on the contrary, an embarrassing topic with the potential of creating further internal divisions.