Teaching Comparative

A Constitution for the UK?

THE ARTICLE FEATURED IN THIS POST IS NO LONGER ONLINE. IN FACT, THE JOURNAL IS NO LONGER ONLINE. KW - 28 August 2008

I'm really embarrassed. Someone sent me a link to a very good teaching resource, I replied with a thank you, and then deleted the e-mail. Naturally, I forgot who sent this to me. It really is a great catch and would be a wonderful article to use near the beginning of a comparative course when considering the UK, constitutionalism, devolution, roles of the judiciary, types of legislatures, and the origins of civil rights and civil liberties.

Thank you. Thank you. Take credit for finding this by using the "Comment" section below.


The article comes from the RSA Journal. The e-JOURNAL is the online version.

The RSA is the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce - commonly known as the RSA. It was founded in 1754 by William Shipley, a painter and social activist, on a manifesto "to embolden enterprise, enlarge science, refine arts, improve our manufactures and extend our commerce". In other words it began as an 18th century think tank. Today, it says of itself, the RSA pursues those five goals in ways "that reflect the original mission in 21st-century terms."



Here are excerpts from the April 2006 article, written by Vernon Bogdanor, professor of government at Oxford University and Gresham Professor of Law at Gresham College. Bogdanor was described as "a leading constitutional expert" in a 2004 Telegraph.co.uk article, "Is this new statute untouchable?"


Please note that at the end of the online article is a very useful list of 15 constitutional reforms since 1997. One of the things I'd do with that list is have students research the details of the changes and evaluate Bogdanor's claims that these things are "revolutionary" changes. The whole article is available online by clicking on the title below.



Tomorrow’s government

"Since the Labour government took office nine years ago, Britain has been engaged in a process that seems unique in the democratic world — that of converting an uncodified constitution into a codified one. This has been done in a piecemeal fashion, for there is neither the political will to move more rapidly, nor any consensus on where the final resting place should be. Nevertheless, since 1997 we have seen an unprecedented and probably uncompleted series of constitutional reforms...

"The cornerstone of our new constitution is likely to be the Human Rights Act, which will transform the relationship between the judiciary and government. Traditionally, our rights have been determined by parliament. In future, they are likely to be derived from a higher law, the European Convention on Human Rights, which the Human Rights Act makes part of our law. Judges are now required to interpret legislation in light of this Convention...

"If Britain is engaged in a long journey towards a codified constitution, it is highly likely that this constitution will be a quasi-federal one. Indeed, the four component parts of the United Kingdom are now governed in four different ways...

"Devolution introduces new constitutional relationships into the United Kingdom, new relationships both between its component parts and, within the House of Commons itself, between MPs representing different constituencies. These relationships are familiar enough in federal states, but wholly unfamiliar in Britain, with the very limited exception of Northern Ireland under ‘Stormont’ between 1921 and 1972...

"...the Human Rights Act and the devolution legislation, and perhaps the European Communities Act of 1972, have the quality of fundamental laws. Perhaps this legislation indicates that we are coming to develop a constitutional sense — a sense that there ought to be publicly proclaimed legal rules limiting the power of government. It would be difficult to imagine a more profound change in our constitutional thinking...

"For we remain one of just three democracies — the others being New Zealand and Israel — without fully codified constitutions. We seem to be living in a halfway house, suspended between our old ‘historic’ constitution and a fully codified one. Whether we come to enjoy living in a halfway house or go on to complete the edifice remains to be seen..."

posted by Ken Wedding @ 5:08 PM