介绍： Bagehot: The machine splutters
Unsexy as it may seem, Britain needs a big constitutional debate
From The Economist 20161112

Audio:

0:00




THE executioner’s axe sailed through the January chill, the pointy-bearded head thudded into the basket and the crowd let out a moan. Spectators in Whitehall rushed ...

介绍： Bagehot: The machine splutters
Unsexy as it may seem, Britain needs a big constitutional debate
From The Economist 20161112

Audio:

0:00




THE executioner’s axe sailed through the January chill, the pointy-bearded head thudded into the basket and the crowd let out a moan. Spectators in Whitehall rushed to dip their handkerchiefs in Charles I’s blood (in 2008 one would materialise at a genteel auction in Gloucestershire). On this final tableau of the English civil war, Parliament having vanquished the autocratic monarchy, were sketched the principles by which power in Britain is exercised today: Parliament is sovereign and the executive’s latitude—known as the “royal prerogative”—has limits.

It was a struggle over where these limits lie that recently saw Theresa May improbably accused of a bid to “reverse the result of the English civil war”. The prime minister wields the royal prerogative in the monarch’s name and wants to invoke Article 50 of the EU treaty, the legal route to Brexit, without consulting Parliament. But the High Court ruled against her and she announced her intention to appeal. Geoffrey Robertson, a human-rights lawyer, accused her of “claiming the power of the Crown could override the will of Parliament”. “If the prime minister [is] so ignorant of the constitution’s obvious requirements then it’s certainly time to write it down,” he kvetched.

Britons should get used to this sort of squabble. Instead of a codified constitution, the country has a series of laws and documents—the oldest being the Magna Carta of 1215—that together convey its traditions and conventions. This slowly evolving body of principles tends to mean good, flexible government. Yet the process of leaving the EU will put it under severe strain.

Britain’s unwritten constitution requires three conditions that have broadly prevailed since the 17th century. First: a consensus among the country’s rulers about certain enduring traditions. Second: a population willing to defer to that elite’s application and interpretation of those traditions. Third: a steady, incremental evolution of those traditions rather than sudden, violent shocks (or as Vernon Bogdanor, a constitutional expert, describes them, constitutional moments). Each of these conditions was slipping even before the referendum. The past two decades have brought more constitutional changes—from devolution to human-rights laws—than the previous couple of centuries. Battles over conventions like the royal prerogative have raged. Voters have become less willing to give elites the benefit of the doubt.

Brexit accelerates all of these trends, as the conflict over Article 50 illustrates. Witness Mrs May’s determination to take on the judges, the vitriol poured on them by newspapers, the battles over whether the House of Lords has a right to block the legislation, the McCarthyite menace looming over every MP tempted to vote against it and the Scottish government’s announcement, on November 8th, that it plans to intervene in the legal case.

And this is just the start of it. Once Brexit negotiations begin, the cabinet, MPs, devolved legislatures, the House of Lords and sometimes the judiciary will find themselves in multi-dimensional tugs-of-war. Who, for example, should scrutinise all the legislation returning from Brussels to British statute books? Should those powers revert to the national level, or be devolved further down? Should Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast have the right to veto any final deal? Can MPs reasonably do so? What about the mayor of London, or the new regional city mayoralties? How can the competing interests and outlooks on Brexit of diverging regions be accommodated?


Then there are the tensions generated by the very fact of the Brexit vote. Not unlike Donald Trump’s victory four months later, the result spoke of social disparities, of a powerlessness felt by many and a distain for aloof elites in a seemingly distant capital city. These pathologies militate for decentralisation, reforms to the cronyish House of Lords and a more responsive electoral system. Over half of voters live in safe seats and many are barely represented (under proportional representation the UK Independence Party would have won 83 seats in Parliament last year. Under first-past-the-post it won one). That Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to stay in the EU could bring further turmoil there as voters are dragged out of the club by their English and Welsh neighbours. Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish first minister, has already published a draft bill for a new independence referendum. A move to a formal federal structure is probably the only long-term way to hold the United Kingdom together.

There is little appetite for a disruptive spasm of constitutional perestroika during the current, volatile period. And there is much to admire in the organic, scruffy, reasonable character of British democracy, reliably bending to social and political gusts like a lithe sapling in a storm. Walter Bagehot, the Victorian editor of this newspaper after whom this column is named, mocked the American notion that “the limited clauses of an old state-paper can provide for all coming cases, and forever regulate the future.” Moreover, the constitutional convention advocated by the likes of Gordon Brown, a former prime minister, sounds suspiciously like a political nerd-fest impenetrable to normal voters.

We the people

Yet there may be no alternative. Britain’s unwritten constitution runs on deference to steadily accumulated precedent. Brexit will create rifts and ambiguities for which no clear precedent exists, and such a volume and tangle of them that attempting to “muddle through”—that is, botch together case-by-case settlements—could result in paralysis or disintegration. Better, surely, to confront all the interlocking quandaries in one big public discussion leading to reforms and perhaps a written constitution. They say Britain avoided the “constitutional moments” of continental Europe and America because it experienced no post-Enlightenment revolution (Charles I lost his head in 1649). But Britain may now be approaching such a moment whether it likes it or not. Brexit was that overdue revolution.

Copyright © 2015-2016 Share2China.com | Powered by Flask and MongoDB