The New Constitution

"Well I think this should be The New Constitution by Vernon Bogdanor. It’s a quite remarkable book. Vernon is an interesting man. Funnily enough, he was David Cameron’s tutor at Oxford – and said that David Cameron was one of his brightest ever pupils. He was a Conservative, he came into the SDP – I don’t quite know where he is, politically, now. He’s Professor of Government at Oxford University. I think he’s got a broad perspective, and the important thing about his book is that he says that we absolutely do, by now, have a written constitution. It’s a myth going on, talking about the Great British anomaly of not having a written constitution. He argues, I think very convincingly, that if you put together the continued treaties of the European Union, and you add to it legislative devolution in Scotland and in Wales and the power-sharing constitutional arrangement in Northern Ireland, and on top of that you add the fact that we made the European Convention on Human Rights, which is nothing to do with the European Union, which came in after the Second World War, and built up a great deal of authority, and now made that justiciable in the British legal system – that is what most countries would call a constitution. Yes, he outlines most of the new ways that it could be done. You find in the book for example a really detailed analysis of hung parliaments – governing without a majority. The Human Rights Act is discussed, and all the complexities of it, and the problems that the Human Rights Act is actually creating in Britain at the moment (with holding terror suspects and so on). On devolution, he discusses in some detail fixed-term parliaments, which I think holds the actual key to whether or not we can make substantive changes, and of course all the history of and the potential of referendums, which in my view has been an extremely important reform. Without the referendum in 1975, I don’t think we would have had the subsequent, fairly long period – nearly 25 years – of broad acceptance of British European Union membership. Certainly without it I think we would have not have been able to handle the Labour Party when they came out in favour of leaving the European Union without even a referendum. I think a referendum for constitutional questions is very important – widening democracy out from the political elite – and I think referendums have been an extremely important step in stopping us going into the Euro. In the financial crisis, at least in terms of growth, we have been able to devalue, we’re not in a fixed rate system of the Eurozone."