The draft EU (Voter Registration) Regulations 2016

Draft EU Referendum (Voter Registration) Regulations 2016 (PDF) Draft EU Referendum (Voter Registration) Regulations 2016 (Text) Here are the draft regulations that will (if approved by resolutions of both Houses of Parliament this morning) extend the voter registration deadline for the EU referendum. Thanks to Rich Greenhill for alerting me to their being online. Click […]

How to extend the referendum voter registration deadline

In response to the overloading of the website where people could register to vote in the coming EU referendum, government is apparently considering how it can extend the deadline (which expired at midnight) by a day: Mr Cameron said people should continue to register on Wednesday, saying the government was working urgently with the commission […]

Prisoners’ votes: the government triangulates

Today has seen the failure in the Court of Appeal of the judicial review in Chester v Justice Secretary, a case that always was hopeless. More importantly, the government intends to give the vote to all prisoners serving less than four year sentences; and to give trial judges the power to ban even these from […]

Prisoners’ votes, and judges going rogue

I’m agnostic about whether prisoners should be allowed to vote – I can see the rehabilitation argument, up to a point, but I understand the view that disfranchisement (as the legislation puts it) is part of punishment, too. So if government had decided to change things as part of its political or penal reform agenda, […]

Kerry McCarthy is innocent!

Or at least I think she may be. She’s trying to get re-elected as an MP, and is as it happens Labour’s new media campaigns spokesman. But she’s in trouble, for having tweeted which parties a sample of postal voters had chosen. Here’s her statement on the matter. There’s been a fair amount of speculation […]

Fixed-term Parliaments: not the answer

One of the strangest aspects of the MP’s expenses scandal has been the way politicians have tried to move public discussion on to questions of sweeping constitutional reform. It seems to me it was the greed of MPs themselves – though not all of them, of course – and the laxness of the system they […]

Charon QC podcast: prisoners and the right to vote

This weekend Charon interviewed John Hirst of Prison Law Inside Out about his experience of life in prison, his thoughts on the penal system and about his victory a couple of years ago in the European Court of Human Rights in Hirst v UK, in which he successfully challenged the legal bar preventing prisoners from […]

Gordon Brown’s decision?

Most discussion of the possibility of a November election assumes that the decision is solely Gordon Brown’s. But is it really that simple? I think not. It’s the Queen who dissolves Parliament in fact, by issuing a proclamation under the great seal saying that she’s directed the Lord Chancellor to send writs to returning officers […]