Leading politicians from across the spectrum baying, for once, in unison with much of our media, want no truck with the idea that prisoners should have the right to vote. "Most people in Scotland, myself included, don't think prisoners should have any right to vote," argued Nicola Sturgeon, at First Minister's questions yesterday. "Completely unacceptable," chipped in Tory leader Annabel Goldie. Earlier, the leading Labour back-bencher, Duncan McNeil, had suggested: "Letting prisoners vote is a crazy idea."

They were still trying to score party points over the implications. What if the May Holyrood elections had to be postponed? What if aggrieved inmates and their no-win, no-fee legal representatives swamped the courts with compensation claims, making off with millions (the estimates on offer vary from £7m to £14m) in hard-earned taxpayers' cash? Is Cell Block X - as The Sun dubbed it - taking over the corridors of power? That said, what really shone through was the synchronised display of moral outrage on offer.

But before this Gadarene rush to exhaust that particular lexicon tramples all rational response underfoot, let's pause and set this instance of cross-party-cum-media consensus into some kind of reasoned context. Of the 41 member states of the Council of Europe, 18 currently permit all their prison population, without restriction, to vote in elections. They include Denmark, Finland, Germany, Holland, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland and Iceland. In there, too, are Albania, Azerbaijan, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Moldova and other fragments of the former Soviet Union. Ireland, with no legal bar on prisoners voting, has been debating ways of allow- ing inmates to cast their ballot while inside.

Apart from the UK, only 11 other states in the 41 ban all sentenced prisoners from voting. They include Russia and Turkey. The others are all from the east, such as Armenia, Bulgaria, Georgia, Hungary, Romania (apart from petty crimes) and Estonia. The only other EU state on that list is Cyprus. Other western European nations opt for partial bans. Belgium sets the bar at sentences of four months or more. Austria chooses a year as its threshold. Italy, five years. In Greece, only lifers are banned from voting. France goes it own way. It charges those doing the sentencing with deciding who should continue to vote or not. Norway does the same, although apparently judges there rarely use that power to take the vote away.

So, on this one, we are in some very questionable company. Certainly not shoulder-to-shoulder with those small enlightened states - such as Norway, Finland, Iceland or even Ireland - which Ms Sturgeon so admires in other ways. Certainly not foursquare with the penal mainstream in Europe. Do we really want to line up with the land that invented the gulags on how we treat our prisoners' rights?

As ever, this hysteria is founded on a very flawed understanding of what the European Court of Human Rights actually decided. It did not tell the UK to give all its prisoners the vote. Indeed, it reaffirmed that, across the 41 member states of the Council of Europe, there is - and should be - a "wide margin of appreciation" in how this issue is addressed. But it concluded that a blanket bar on voting, such as the UK's, does not fall within an "acceptable" margin. The court, in my view, was right to reach that conclusion.

Remarkably, our approach to whether prisoners should have the vote or not is still founded on the kind of Victorian values that should have no place in our world. Concepts from the late-1800s such as "civic death" - the idea that those who break the law and are sent to prison should, in addition, forfeit fundamental rights as citizens - pander to a "lock them up and throw away the key" mentality that snuffs out any prospect of rehabilitation, let alone reform. Even Botany Bay harboured some of that.

In a world where we can't build enough prisons fast enough to house all those being sent there by courts, still banging the drum for civic death after more than 100 years of witnessing its failure to deliver meaningful results is collective madness. There's been no serious national debate about this issue since a multi-party Speaker's Conference in 1968 recommended that convicted prisoners in custody should not be entitled to vote. But the subsequent legislation ensured that even remand prisoners, convicted of absolutely nothing but currently accounting for nearly one-fifth of the average daily population in Scottish prisons, were also unable to vote. That particularly nasty twist on civic death was only ended with the Representation of the People Act 2000.

But that retributionist mindset hasn't gone away. Following the October 2005 judgment from the European Court of Human Rights in the Hirst case, the UK government promised, in February 2006, to consult on the consequences. It took the Department for Constitutional Affairs until last month to come up with the goods. And in the opening sentence of his foreword to the consultation paper, Lord Falconer of Thoroton, someone else who cannot vote, made his entrenched position plain: "The right to vote in the UK is considered by many to be a privilege as well as an entitlement, and that persons who are convicted of an offence serious enough to warrant a term in prison have cast aside that privilege and entitlement for the duration of their sentence. Successive UK governments have held to the view that the right to vote forms part of the social contract between individuals and the state, and that the loss of the right to vote . . . is a proper and proportionate punishment for breaches of the social contract that resulted in imprisonment."

If the right to vote is really only a privilege, who gets to take it away from us? Surely not those currently being investigated over cash-for-honours allegations? Surely not politicians who only got round to giving the vote back to remand prisoners five years ago? And why opt for such an arbitrary sanction? Given the average length of sentence handed out by the courts these days (around 10 months), most inmates are in and out of prison before the next election comes along. Why should only those who are inside when it's time to vote lose that fundamental democratic right?

Any legal challenge to the May elections taking place should be given the short shrift it deserves. Success on that front would subvert many more human rights than it assuaged. But the chorus of political condemnation of any prisoners keeping their vote speaks volumes about the first instinct of too many of our would-be legislators. Forget principles, let's play to the gallery.