In theory, Britain is the most democratic country in the world. There has never been any limit to what an elected Parliament and a royal signature can do. The obstructions to an elected majority only exist by the sufferance of this power, and could be abolished at will. The ‘Rule of Law’, whatever that means, does not rule in Britain – Parliament does. Glance at the alternatives, at provincial Hawaiian judges vetoing federal border policies as a matter of course. Not so in Britain. Tomorrow, Parliamentary sovereignty could abolish the Supreme Court. It could abolish the BBC, or the Human Rights Act, or Whitehall itself.
This power has seldom been exercised. But that is scarcely the point. It exists – more than that – it burns, white hot, at the centre of national life. We’ve caught tantalising glimpses of it before, when Britain’s membership of the EU was brought to an end with a single vote of the legislature.
This counts for more than a little. President Trump attempting to exercise some kind of federal veto over a Californian gender self-ID law would have instantly spawned a national crisis; in Britain, something exactly analogous passed off with little more than a shrug.
Parliament’s status means that Britain is uniquely capable of carrying out the kind of course corrections that healthy democracies have to make from time to time. New Labour and its heirs fear this above all else. They are right to. Accordingly, the main thrust of their constitutional programme has been to destroy Parliament and its powers. Curiously absent from contemporary lowing about institutions and the need to defend them is Westminster itself. Established Britain believes that bureaucrats and seamy quangos are beyond criticism, but has over the past 25 years outsourced many of Parliament’s powers, and has removed its judicial function entirely. Weekly proposals emerge to chop, change and transform it out of all recognition, into some kind of rigmarole of Estates – half feudal, half Dr. Seuss. Assemblies of the North. Assemblies of Great British High Street Heroes. An Assembly of the Nations, Regions, Auntie Beeb and Richard Osman. Assemblies of the ‘Head, Heart, and Hand’. An Assembly of the Potteries. An Assembly for Young People (aged 33).
The proposals of Keir Starmer’s ‘A New Britain‘ constitution, written up by Gordon Brown, are designed to destroy Parliament forever – and by extension anything approaching popular sovereignty in Britain. These are: the subordination of Parliament to the judiciary; universal English devolution; the reorganisation of Britain as a multi-national state; and the enshrining of the current social order as a constitution.
‘A New Britain’ will close off any route to democratic change. Blairite society, threatened by new adversaries, and, still more, by new technologies for sharing information, seeks to preserve its waning powers by transforming the U.K. into an ungovernable, ramshackle outfit on the pattern of late Poland-Lithuania or the Holy Roman Empire. A series of legal devices will be cooked up to prevent any change from our trajectory towards mediocrity and impoverishment.
Read More: Labour’s ‘New Britain’ Constitution Will End Parliamentary Democracy
