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These are hard times for the government and there is no respite. Today, parliament will debate a prisoner’s right to vote, in accordance with the wishes of the resented European Court of Human Rights. The Guardian’s Patrick Wintour writes what many suspect: on the back of a free vote, the House will deny prisoners the right to vote in all cases and outlaw compensation claims. Such a result would seem a set-back for the government, which was thought to favour a limited franchise on prisoner voting. If it became law, then the government would apparently be at odds with the ECHR – precipitating an ignominious procession of grasping lags, searching

Thursday’s debate on the backbench motion on prisoner voting tabled by Jack Straw and David Davis is set to be a real parliamentary event – a rare occasion where the will of the elected legislature might just make a big difference.  The real news will not be how many endorse the ban, but which MPs – aside from those abstaining Government Ministers and Denis MacShane – choose to bow to Strasbourg.   MPs preparing to speak out against Strasbourg are now armed with a powerful academic case.  A new Policy Exchange report authored by the political scientist Michael Pinto-Duschinsky – Bringing Rights Back Home – outlines how the UK can

An ingenious man, John Hirst. First he achieved the considerable feat of committing manslaughter with an axe; and he has since proceeded to cause governments no end of trouble. The prisoner voting saga is nearing its end and a fug of ignominy is descending on the government. The BBC reports that the coalition is to dilute its policy of enfranchising prisoners serving less than four years. Now ministers will be seeking to enfranchise only those serving a year or less. This u-turn is the result of the alliance between Jack Straw and David Davis and the slew of assorted backbench dissent. Tim Montgomerie argues that this is yet another example

David Davis and Jack Straw have joined forces to resist the enforcement of prisoner voting rights, an emotive issue bequeathed to the hapless coalition by the previous government. Beside the obvious moral question concerning prisoners’ rights, Davis hopes to open a second front in the struggle over sovereignty with the European Union. He told Politics Home: ‘There are two main issues here. First is whether or not it is moral or even decent to give the vote to rapists, violent offenders or sex offenders. The second is whether it is proper for the European court to overrule a Parliament.’ Unless Davis has confused his articles, his second point is invalid.

The EU Bill is back in parliament today, amid speculation that Cameron has a Europe-fuelled rebellion on his hands. Despite the talk, the chances are that the Bill will go through Parliament wholly unscathed in its first test.   Today’s debate is about the so-called ‘sovereignty clause’ – or Clause 18 – within the EU Bill. Of the Bill’s 17 pages, the clause only takes up four lines, but has still managed to cause the most fuss (the vast majority of the text relates to the EU ‘referendum lock’).   The government claims that Clause 18 confirms that EU law “is only recognised by virtue of the authority of acts

The High Court has just declared the government’s temporary cap on non-EU immigration is unlawful. Its ground was that the cap was not introduced with proper parliamentary scrutiny. However, the annual cap, which will not be in place until April next year, is not affected by this decision. But without a temporary cap there’ll be a spike in applications as people try and beat the cap. It’ll be fascinating to see how the PM and the Home Secretary respond to this ruling. At the moment, the government is playing it softly, softly. But there are Tories who think that the government cannot just allow a key part of its flagship

It may take another week to discover if Phil Woolas has the right to challenge the election court ruling that destroyed his career. To the delight of his cadre of supporters in the House, judges have said there are “difficult questions to resolve” – not about the evidence of Woolas’ campaign making “false statements”, but about the specific application of the Representation of the People Act (RPA). Before the last die is cast, here are two quick contextual points. First, it is not just Harriet Harman who is keen to shut down this episode – many folks on all sides of the House of Commons would like to pretend skulduggery

The violence at today’s student protest is, politically, a boon to the coalition. The story now is not the Lib Dems breaking their word but the storming of Millbank. The violence will also have cost the no-fees cause much public sympathy, we don’t like attempts at aggressive direct action in this country. There are questions that need to be answered after today, why were the cops so unprepared for the protest turning violent? I crossed through the protest at lunchtime and then it was quite clear that there was potential for trouble. I’m also bemused as to why it is taking so long to put a stop to the violence

The Tory party’s acceptance of a 2.9 percent increase in the EU budget has persuaded Steve Richards that ‘Europe has ceased to be a toxic issue in British politics.’ As Steve acknowledges, this is in part because the Euro-sceptics have won the argument over the single currency. But it is also because the Tory parliamentary party has accepted that the coalition means nothing positive is happening on the Europe front for the next few years. One thing, though, needs to be borne in mind: the Tory party is more Euro-sceptic than it has been in living memory. Talk to new Tory MPs, who are mostly hardcore sceptics, about Europe and

Neither Ed Miliband nor David Cameron had a good PMQs. Cameron let his irritation at questions about the appointment of his campaign photographer to a civil service post show. It was also a bit rich for him to criticise a Labour MP for asking a question scripted by the whips when Tory MPs ask patsy questions with monotonous regularity, I counted at least four in this session alone. But the regular shouts of ‘cheese, cheese’ from the Labour benches were clearly riling the Prime Minister. But it wasn’t a good session for Ed Miliband either. His delivery was rather halting and he stumbled on his words far more than he

It was unlikely that the Coalition could have played for any more time before lifting the ban on prisoner voting.  That was the tactic played by the previous Government, but now it seems the will of Strasbourg will prevail.  But the policy is wildly out of step with public opinion, hard to justify and difficult to administer – it is also another example of how our own Parliament and domestic courts have been undermined.     The public are opposed – usually on principle – to granting additional privileges to serving prisoners, especially when they have done little or nothing to earn it.  They are against voting rights in particular

CoffeeHousers may like to see the full leaked letter (pasted below) to which I referred in The Spectator’s cover story this week. It shows how the NUT is using Freedom of Information to try and force school heads to hand over a list of names of anyone who might support a campaign to opt out of local authority control and become quasi-independent Academies. We have blacked out any information that may reveal the source. This letter helps explain why Michael Gove will have so few names next week, when he lists the list of schools who have succeeded in their fast-track application. Out of the 3,000 eligible, a few dozen

Has Mark Hoban just become the first victim of the New Labour landmines? He was asked on the Today Programme whether the Treasury had conducted a formal study assessing the impact of the cuts on ethnic minorities. Hoban was speechless – as well you might be. But the assessment, he was told, is required under Harriet Harman’s Equalities Act. Has it been carried out? He avoided the question and was asked it again. And so it continued, a la Paxman v Howard. When Labour retreated, it sewed several landmines in the political territory it was about to cede. One of them was Harman’s Equalities Act, which – as Pete blogged

David Cameron’s so-called “referendum lock” is supposed to ensure no more powers are handed to the EU. His thinking, bless him, is that if he just keeps a low profile and doesn’t sign any extra treaties then things won’t get worse. This fundamentally mistakes the way the EU works. As we say in the leader for this week’s magazine, ever-greater integration is hardwired into the system. An example we cite is the coming European Investigatory Order, which Theresa May has naively described to other ministers as a tidying up exercise (Jack Straw said the same about the EU constitution).  As we put it: “Another power grab is looming. Plans are

Before such fripperies were banned, al-Qaeda terrorists were given lessons in stand-up comedy while in high-security prisons. I’d have thought that the exploding underpants fraternity had natural advantages in comedy, but never mind. What I want to know is who gave the lessons? It’d be ironic if it was a voluntary group. The Mail has worked itself into a panicked fury about that the ban on prison parties would be revoked. To be fair to the Mail, Crispin Blunt, the Prisons Minister claimed as much in speech last night, and he vowed to abolish Indeterminate Sentences for Public Protection – orders that incarcerate the sort of charmers who butcher you

Very little is my immediate answer. The President’s approval ratings are biting the dust. Powerless to stem the tide of oil and unpopularity, Obama can only victimise a ‘foreign’ oil company. Obama may be embattled at home, but if any doubt the US President’s ability to influence global events, they need only look at BP’s share value and the pension funds derived thereof. BP is mired in an expensive oil disaster, but the President’s rhetoric about the ‘habitual environmental criminal’ and threatening BP with criminal proceedings demolishes market confidence. If the British government had condemned AIG, Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch in similar tones, the US administration would have retorted.

I would like to defend the coalition from allegations that there has been a deplorable Tory concession on the Human Rights Act. Tearing it up was never in the Tory manifesto. Dominic Grieve, who drafted the Tory plan, is one of those lawyers who is rather passionate about the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) and praised it in his maiden speech. I had many conversations with him about this: for Britain to pull out of it, he said, would send an “odd” signal to the countries on the fringes of Europe whom we were trying to pull into our orbit. Grieve’s plan was to propose a Bill of Rights