Giving prisoners the vote undermines democracy
AS the Scottish Parliament election draws closer it is worth looking back at the 2020 decision made in Holyrood to grant short-term prisoners and refugees the vote. Like many modern policies giving the vote to prisoners and refugees feels right. It feels caring, moral, good. But is it?
It’s one of the quirks of modern-day politics that people get given things they haven’t asked for. Sixteen-year-olds, for example, were given the vote in Scotland in 2015, and yet there were few people, outside elite circles, who campaigned for this.
Historically, the extension of the franchise has been something you had to pry from the hands of the establishment. Today, the opposite seems to be the case, and hundreds of thousands of votes are being handed out by our cosmopolitan leaders.
Like many other votes in Holyrood, we find the usual 80:20 split, with approximately 80 per cent of MSPS in the parliament representing the voice of the enlightened “liberal” who wants to open things up, and 20 per cent opposed to the change.
Ask the public what they think about this change, and I suspect you would find the inverse result, with around 80 per cent being opposed to giving votes to prisoners and refugees. In this respect, once again, Holyrood proves itself to be an elite institution.
This is an interesting irony, that Holyrood appears to be so morally good, so open and enlightened about voting and democracy, and yet they pass a ruling that goes against the will of the people. But this is what politics has become, a form of advocacy for “outsiders” above the heads of the public.
Politicians talk a lot about inclusion – they like to “include” people. They particularly like to include people who, “have no voice”, or individuals who can be clubbed together and described as being part of a “vulnerable group”. These are people for whom they can
Prisoners have committed an act that society deems worthy of punishment. Liberty is lost
act as advocates, a little like the relationship between a social worker and a child.
By standing up for the voiceless, the outsider, our modern elites get a sense of moral goodness without the hassle of having to deal with actual subjects, or citizens; people who can act for themselves rather than needing to be included or empowered or supported.
The modern elites also love what is called cosmopolitan nationalism, this fits in with their love of the EU and is a form of quasinationalism that, more than anything else, is predicated upon a fear and loathing of the imagined bigoted, national populous.
With prisoners and refugees, we have these two things combined; an advocacy for the outsider-prisoner, and an embracing of non-nationals, who, with the stroke of a pen, are miraculously included in the number of “citizens” who can vote.
Of course, the problem with this is that neither group represents citizenship in any meaningful way. Prisoners have committed an act that society deems worthy of punishment. Liberty is lost and, temporarily, your citizenship of a national community is revoked. Indeed, your very existence within a prison means you cannot actively participate in an election in any meaningful way.
As you can imagine, having the right to vote is not top on the list of concerns for the vast majority of prisoners. For human rights activists, lawyers, preachers and politicians, however, it is a badge of goodness and decency. And as usual, their efforts for reform have come in the corridors of Brussels and Strasbourg, rather than on the streets and community centres of their home nations.
Similarly, the idea of giving votes to non-citizen refugees who reside in the country undermines the idea of citizenship in terms of commitment and belonging to a particular nation.
The legalistic and elitist mechanisms used to enforce these changes onto the public should tell us that what we are witnessing in the creation of these voters is not an extension of democracy but the undermining of what it means to be a democratic citizen.