I never thought I would ever become disabled due to meningitis. But I did – in 2007 in fact.

I contracted meningitis out-of-the-blue, and I spent two months in a coma.

How the law deals with prisoner voting is all about our attitude to prisoners and proportionality. I am not saying at all that some people might become prisoners ‘by accident’, but I think the attitude held by some that ‘I will never be a prisoner’ is dangerous. There are some people who will find themselves on the wrong side of the law, having disobeyed the notion of legal responsibility, and they will require punishment. However, there will be some who go to prisoner for less serious offences, and whether they vote or not is an artefact of the timing of their prison sentence. One would hope that the majority of these people can be successfully welcomed back into society, as productive members of society.

It is particularly dangerous for some people to think that they will never go to prison. Fraud by false accounting, insider trading, or tax evasion, the so-called ‘white collar crimes’, are not specific to the lower classes; in fact, quite the opposite. More’s the point, human rights are universal rights, and we have opted into the European Convention of Human Rights; it’s simply impossible for us to pick-and-choose which rights we wish to be party to, such as right to be free from torture, either on a geographical or temporal basis, and nobody is above the law.

And, more importantly, the central doctrine of the law is that of proportionality. Therefore, a reasonable mature reaction would be to consider how we can apply the advice of the European Court of Human Rights to say that perhaps a total ban on prisoner voting is for those who we genuinely wish to be disenfranchised  from the decisions of society for a considerable period of time.

An easy option is to run with very populist arguments, but playing with the topic of prisoner voting is as reckless as a libertarian wishing to dissolve the National Health Service and then finding he develops terminal cancer, potentially. People who wish to buy into a system should be allowed to, if it is reasonable.

I have never been to prison, for the record. I have been to public school, however.