¹ Ward's time frame mirrors that of the narrative of John Mortimer's Paradise Postponed (1985) to which the title of this response alludes.

² Kumarasingham, H., ‘Written Differently: A Survey of Commonwealth Constitutional History in the Age of Decolonisation’, Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History, 46 (2018), 877CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ See Parkinson, Charles, Bills of Rights and Decolonization (Oxford, 2007)Google Scholar (discussing British enthusiasm for including bills of rights in new constitutions, notwithstanding ‘hostility’ to the concept for the United Kingdom itself).

⁴ Jennings, Ivor, Approach to Self-Government (Cambridge, 1956), 1Google Scholar.

⁵ Note, for example, the efforts of the ‘Keith Forum on Commonwealth Constitutionalism’, University of Edinburgh, https://www.law.ed.ac.uk/research/research-projects/keith-forum-commonwealth-constitutionalism (accessed 20 Jul. 2023).

⁶ Twenty years ago, Stephen Howe wrote that ‘the emerging historiography of Britain's “internal decolonization” remains at present empirically weak, conceptually cloudy, and often unhelpfully polarized’. Howe, Stephen, ‘Internal Decolonization? British Politics since Thatcher as Post-colonial Trauma’, Twentieth Century British History, 14 (2003), 286CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

And it is still contested. To my mind, Ward wisely sidesteps the questions of whether the nations that make up the United Kingdom should be considered ‘colonies’ of England – or even whether to think about the process of devolution as decolonisation in any sense – in order to retain the nuances of the ‘far more complex reality’. Ibid., 5.

⁷ Scott, Paul, ‘The Privy Council and the Constitutional Legacies of Empire’, Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly, 71 (2020), 261Google Scholar.

⁸ Cf. generally Kumarasingham, H. (ed.), Constitution-Maker: Selected Writings of Sir Ivor Jennings (Cambridge, 2014), 1–18Google Scholar.

⁹ Colley, Linda, The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen (New York, 2021), 73, 215Google Scholar. For further discussion of Colley's argument, see Erin F. Delaney, ‘Of Constitutions and Constitutionalism’, Balkinization (27 Oct. 2021), https://balkin.blogspot.com/2021/10/of-constitutions-and-constitutionalism.html.