BRITAIN needs to keep the ban on prisoners voting. And they can’t vote to let some prisoners vote, and not others, because all prisoners lost any rights they had the day they entered the prison gates.

They came under a different regime, a regime that had its own code of practice and you as a prisoner were given a rule book and you had to abide by the rules in that book.

Your name became a secondary part of your life, you were given a prison number and you had to give that number and then your name. Your whole term in prison revolved round the rule book and that’s how it should be today.

Give them permission to vote and you could find that a lot of ex-cons will sue the Government, because we will say that, really we did have rights but were told otherwise.

So this Government doesn’t even want to consider going down this road.

P. HOWARD (Mr), Brome Place, Barton, Oxford