Tag: constitution
-
The government rhetoric about the House of Lords’ threat to derail their cherished plan to cut tax credits has been extraordinary over the last few days. To believe it, you would have to think that we are in the deadlocked position Parliament found itself between 1909 and 1911, when the then Liberal government attempted to…
-
If there’s a problem with the Unspoken Constitution its that it barely qualifies as satire. The shenanigans surrounding MPs’ expenses, Carter-Ruck’s single handed attempt to rewrite the UK constitution to favour their client Trafigura and this torrid little paper sneaked out by the Ministry of Justice today (which patiently explains why Royal Prerogative powers are,…
-
Sniping at Tory mendacity aside, I can’t help but feel a palpable sense of complacency in the Observer today over the Damian Green affair. First up, we have the normally sensible Vernon Bogdanor. WTF? It doesn’t take a Professor of Government at Oxford University to tell you that the police actions were constitutional. The “virtue”…
-
If you want evidence of how weak the UK’s model of Parliamentary democracy truly is, you only need to glance at this article: Parliament should be able to bypass ministers and launch its own inquiries into issues of “exceptional” public concern such as the Iraq war, MPs say. This is a power that pretty much…
-
The UK, famously, does not have a codified constitution. We have the beginnings of what is vaguely termed a “supreme court” but it explicitly does not have a constitutional role. How, therefore, does Stuart Wheeler intend to argue the case for his proposal to judicially review the government’s decision not to progress with a referendum…