Do not collect two hundred pounds!

Do you think people who are in Prison should be able to vote?

I ask because it was reported in the news yesterday that the British Prime Minister was miffed because of a directive from the European Parliament that will oblige him to accord this right to Her Majesty’s inmates.

Now there are a few important things at work here.

The most obvious, clearly, is that this is the third consecutive post in which the word miffed has appeared and I therefore declare it word of the month – I think you can trawl through the rest of the blog only to find its absence.

I ask the question because I drove home yesterday, from city far to autumn colours ablaze, listening- as is my occasional wont – to Talk Sport Radio which was having some sort of debate/phone in/slanging match on the subject, and one debater/caller/slanger after another expressed their outrage and incomprehension at what some even called a mental idea.

By the end of my 90-kilometer drive I felt like a complete pariah, as no one – except a representative of the prison service who was subsequently slanged – expressed any support for or understanding of the concept.

I was swimming alone in a mire of reactionaries.

I had to check if I was mad when I arrived home and conducted an unscientific analysis of the opinion that resides under the same roof as me.

Then we were four.

I tried to understand the opinions of the debaters/callers/slangers and as far as I was capable it seemed to boil down to this – if you break a law enacted by a government then you have no right to vote in the election of that government or any other government.

I find this argument shorted sighted at best.

Dangerously undemocratic in the middle.

And something I am unable to articulate at worst.