Aims and approach

This book is intended as a work of practical constitutional scholarship applied to an urgent, pressing problem. It is not a book on constitutional history, constitutional law, constitutional theory or comparative politics – although it draws upon each of those disciplines. It is, rather, an attempt to identify the pressing affliction of the British body-politic and to recommend a remedy.

The affliction is a deep constitutional crisis. The ‘unwritten constitution’, which grew up over the centuries from a hotchpotch of statutes, judicial decisions, disputed conventions and half-remembered traditions, has reached the end of its useful life. The remedy is a new constitutional settlement founded upon a written constitution. Mere cosmetic tinkering is not enough. Further piecemeal, make-do-andmend improvisation will only confuse, not resolve, the matter. The only hope for the revival of our democracy is a written constitution: a supreme and fundamental law, founded upon a broad political and societal consensus, in which the fundamental principles of the state are declared, the rights of the people are protected, the various institutions of government are defined, and the relationships between them regulated.

Although there are a few novel touches, the constitutional proposals advanced in this book are likely to be familiar – and acceptable – to most supporters of constitutional reform. They reflect the ‘Charter 88 agenda’ (discussed in Chapter 2) that has motivated constitutional reformers in Britain for the last three decades. The originality of the book lies less in its specific constitutional proposals and more in the approach by which they are reached and the means by which they are justified. The book responds to the new constitutional crisis, unanticipated by the reformers of the pre-1997 era. Then, the main impetus for reform was a fear of what Lord Hailsham called ‘elective dictatorship’ – the concentration of power in the Prime Minister at the head of the governing majority. This fear has not diminished – indeed, with the return to majority government in the 2019 general election, it might have increased. However, it is now merely part of a wider crisis, which includes a general disintegration and distortion of the unwritten constitution, the erosion of its moral foundations and the collapse of its long-held assumptions.