How does David Cameron's apartheid policy fit in with his we're all in this together policy?
In Hirst v UK (No2), the Prisoners Votes Case:
2. South Africa
38. On 1 April 1999, in August and another v. Electoral Commission and others (CCT8/99: 1999 (3) SA 1), the Constitutional Court of South Africa considered the application of prisoners for a declaration and orders that the Electoral Commission take measures enabling them and other prisoners to register and vote while in prison. It noted that under the South African Constitution the right of every adult citizen to vote in elections for legislative bodies was set out in unqualified terms and underlined the importance of the right:
"The universality of the franchise is important not only for nationhood and democracy. The vote of each and every citizen is a badge of dignity and personhood. Quite literally, it says that everybody counts".
Edwin Cameron states:
“Rights and rights-talk can confer the dignity of moral citizenship.
Moral citizenship is a person’s sense that he or she is a fully entitled member of society, undisqualified from enjoyment of its privileges and opportunities by any feature of his or her humanhood.
It does not consist in mere freedom from criminal penalties and other legal burdens, but is something richer, subtler and perhaps deeper: it is a state of mind produced by the absence of criminal penalties and legal burdens.
It is the sense of non-disqualification, of non-exclusion, and of positive entitlement that freedom from disqualification and from official sanction
engender”.
What David Cameron is doing by separating prisoners from being human beings, and part of society, is operating a policy of apartheid.
A mixture of law, politics, autobiography and humour. Once described as "The Devilish Advocate" (Guardian), I do have the ability to provoke a response. Sometimes it comes from someone who uses a thought process, and sometimes from jerks usually associated with the knee.
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