We must act now: without a written constitution, UK reform will have carte blanche to poison our nation George Monbiot
AAfter spending two years in Brazil, I felt I understood its political system better than I did the UK. The reason is a short, plain-language book that almost everyone owns: the Constitution, published in 1988. I must have discovered the document’s limitations while trying to explain its principles to an angry military police commander with a machine gun. But at least I knew exactly which of my rights were being violated.
To achieve a similar understanding of rights and powers in the UK, you must be a professor of constitutional law. they It is contained In a Broad and contradictory A morass of legal codes, court precedents, codes of conduct, scientific opinions, treaties, traditions, gentlemen’s agreements and unwritten rules. It’s made less clear by arcane parliamentary procedures and vague language to the point where we need a translation app.
This chaos allows a lot of room for interpretation, which cruel operators easily exploit. Think of Boris Johnson using the powers of Henry VIII and proroguing Parliament, or Tony Blair’s attempt to prevent Parliament from discussing his attack on Iraq, by invoking Royal privilege. These “gentlemen” are not gentlemen. Unwritten rules are for suckers.
This does not mean that the United Kingdom does not have a constitution. We have one, but its thread is as easy to trace as fishing line washed up on shore after months at sea, bunched up and tattered with weeds and tar. And in this horrific legal tangle, our citizenship is encrypted. If democracy is not clear and understandable, it is not democracy.
This issue has become urgent since the Brexit vote. But the matter has become even more urgent today, as we may now be threatened by a blatantly authoritarian government. For example, Richard Tice, deputy leader of Reform UK Express admiration As for the authoritarian United Arab Emirates, his partner Isabel Oakeshott approved the article He wrote about it Moving to Dubai in the Telegraph. She praised the absence of protests, the fact that “there is no safety net” and that people “who cannot take care of themselves are simply imprisoned or deported”, and downplayed the poor working conditions of migrant workers (they are underpaid!). She might have added that Homosexuality is illegalFor, there is no significant environmental protection Modern slavery diffuse. Dubai is a paradise for the rich and hell for everyone. Tice claims that the UK, by contrast, became “decadent”: A word that should ring alarm bells for any historian.
In a country where there is no clear (“codified”) constitution, there is none To stop the government With a secure majority it would make the UK more like the UAE, or any other dictatorship.
As the chaos that followed the Brexit referendum reminded us, Parliament is sovereign at almost all times. The referendum was a rare act of popular sovereignty, and its outcome threw Parliament into disarray Spin flat. What parliamentary sovereignty means is that Parliament can do whatever it wants to us, as long as a majority is achieved. There are no effective limits to its actions. By contrast, in a true democracy People are sovereignwith fundamental rights that cannot be revoked.
The problem is compounded by the fact that we do not have a codified separation of powers. Through the use of whips and threats, any executive body (the Prime Minister, the Council of Ministers, and the advisors) that controls a large majority of representatives can force Parliament to carry out its will. In other words, Parliament seized the powers that should be vested in the people, and the Prime Minister seized the powers that should be vested in Parliament. This is what”Electoral dictatorship“Means.
We have been fortunate that no government has yet explored the full scope of such powers. Johnson and Liz Truss have been frustrated by their messy failure to prepare, just as Donald Trump was in his first term. His supporters at American Scrap Tanks, led by the Heritage Foundation, have ensured that such a mistake will not be made again. that it Project 2025 I researched the weaknesses of the US Constitution and discovered that many of its guarantees are illusory when the president has a majority in Congress and the Supreme Court appears to be in his back pocket.
I’d be surprised if Westminster tanks were junk She wasn’t preparing Project 2029 for UK reform, to take full advantage of our greatest vulnerabilities. Well-funded organizations like the Atlas Network exist to reproduce successful strategies in country after country.
It is not difficult to imagine a government in this country using legal instruments to expand its executive power, enabling it to impose more legal instruments, and so on, until the weak thing we call democracy disappears altogether. If we want to protest such strategies? Sorry, too late. In the absence of constitutional guarantees, Labor and the Conservatives have already removed almost all of these rights. Democratic collapse could happen almost overnight.
If Keir Starmer had sought to keep the door open for Nigel Farage, he could not have done a better job. He created disillusionment and alienation on an industrial scale. adoptive Farage-like positions On asylum and immigration, it legitimizes reform while delegitimizing Labour. The least he owes us now is some protection against the worst that could happen. Constitution, in other words.
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Ideally, this should be done slowly, and against a backdrop of commitment to the statement. But our situation is beginning to look like a political emergency. It’s also an opportunity we may never see again in our lifetime. Thanks to the ridiculous results of our majoritarian system, Labor won 62% of the seats in the House of Commons. He can easily obtain a two-thirds majority, which is the majority needed in most countries to make constitutional change.
Transformation can begin with a constitutional convention of citizens. Like Iceland Perhaps, participatory events across the country. Imagine: a thoughtful, deliberative process that treats us as active, intelligent citizens, not as political consumers! This alone would be a huge break from the way power now works in this country. This would fuel a parliamentary process of enormous ambition and scope, which in itself could revitalize faith in politics. This will help us decide collectively what we want and who we are. It would leave us with a clear, transparent and understandable set of rights and powers. Who will oppose this except the tyrant and his advisors?
Of course, the Constitution is no guarantee against tyranny, as the United States is discovering. But it makes the would-be tyrant’s job more difficult, and gives us the tools to fight back. Preserving our tangled and opaque settlement is an elite project. Replacing it with a codified version is the work of democracy.