7 hours ago
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After two years in Brazil, I felt I understood its political system better than I understand the UK’s. The reason is a short book in simple language that almost everyone owned: the constitution, published in 1988. Admittedly, I discovered the document’s limitations while trying to explain its principles to a furious captain of the military police with a pump-action shotgun. But at least I knew exactly which of my rights he was infringing.
To achieve a similar grasp of rights and powers in the UK, you’d need to be a professor of constitutional law. They are contained in a vast and contradictory morass of legal statutes, court precedents, codes of conduct, scholarly opinions, treaties, traditions, gentlemen’s agreements and unwritten rules. They are rendered still less intelligible by arcane parliamentary procedures and language so opaque that we need a translation app.
This mess allows great scope for interpretation, which ruthless operators readily exploit. Think of Boris Johnson’s use of Henry VIII powers and his prorogation of parliament, or Tony Blair’s attempt to stop parliament debating his attack on Iraq, by invoking royal prerogative. These “gentlemen” are no gentlemen. Unwritten rules are for suckers.
It’s not that the UK has no constitution. We have one, but its thread is as easy to follow as a fishing line washed ashore after months at sea, bundled and ravelled in weed and tar. In that horrific legal tangle, our citizenship is encoded. If democracy is not clear and intelligible, it’s not democracy.
The issue has been pressing since the Brexit vote. But it becomes still more urgent today, as we may now be threatened with a blatantly authoritarian government. To give one example, Richard Tice, deputy leader of Reform UK, has expressed admiration for the autocratic United Arab Emirates, agreeing with the article his partner Isabel Oakeshott wrote about moving to Dubai in the Telegraph. She lauded the absence of protests, the fact that there is “no safety net” and that people who “can’t look after themselves are simply imprisoned or deported”, and minimised the poor working conditions of migrant labourers (they are getting paid!). She might have added that homosexuality is illegal, there are no significant environmental protections and modern-day slavery is rife. Dubai is a paradise for the rich and hell for everyone else. Tice claims that the UK, by contrast, has become “decadent”: a word that should ring any historian’s alarm bells.
In a country without a clearly resolved (“codified”) constitution, there is nothing to stop a government with a safe majority from making the UK more like the UAE, or any other dictatorship.
As the chaos after the EU referendum reminded us, at nearly all times, parliament is sovereign. The referendum was a rare act of popular sovereignty, whose result sent parliament into a flat spin. What parliamentary sovereignty means is that parliament can do whatever the hell it likes to us, as long as a majority is achieved. There are no effective limits on its actions. In a true democracy, by contrast, the people are sovereign, with fundamental rights that cannot be cancelled.
The problem is compounded by the fact that we have no codified separation of powers. Through the use of whips and threats, any executive (prime minister, cabinet and advisers) commanding a significant majority of MPs can force parliament to do its will. In other words, parliament has seized the powers that should be vested in the people, and the prime minister has seized the powers that should be vested in parliament. This is what “elective dictatorship” means.
We’ve been lucky that no government has yet explored the full scope of such powers. Johnson and Liz Truss were thwarted by their own chaotic failure to prepare, just as Donald Trump was in his first term. His supporters in US junktanks, led by the Heritage Foundation, ensured that no such mistake would be made again. Its Project 2025 probed the weaknesses of the US constitution and discovered that many of its safeguards are illusory when the president has majorities in Congress, and the supreme court seemingly in his back pocket.
I would be surprised if the Westminster junktanks were not preparing a Project 2029 for Reform UK, to make full use of our much greater vulnerabilities. Well-funded organisations such as the Atlas Network exist to reproduce successful strategies in one country after another.
It is not hard to picture a government in this country using statutory instruments to extend its executive authority, enabling it to impose further statutory instruments, and so on, until the feeble thing we call democracy vanishes altogether. And if we want to protest against such strategies? Sorry, too late. Without constitutional safeguards, Labour and the Conservatives have already deleted almost all those rights. Democratic implosion could happen almost overnight.
If Keir Starmer had sought to hold the door open for Nigel Farage, he couldn’t have done a better job. He has manufactured disillusionment and alienation on an industrial scale. By adopting Farage-like positions on asylum and immigration, he legitimises Reform while delegitimising Labour. The very least he now owes us is some protection against the worst that could happen. A constitution, in other words.
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Ideally, it would be done slowly, and on the back of a manifesto commitment. But our situation is beginning to look like a political emergency. It’s also an opportunity we may not see again in our lifetimes. Thanks to the absurd results of our first-past-the-post system, Labour has 62% of seats in the Commons. It could easily muster a two-thirds majority, necessary in most countries for constitutional change.
The shift could begin with a citizens’ constitutional convention, like Iceland’s perhaps, and participatory events all over the country. Imagine: a thoughtful, deliberative process that treats us as active and intelligent citizens, rather than political consumers! That alone would be a major break from the way power now operates in this country. This would feed into a parliamentary process huge in ambition and scope, which in itself could revitalise faith in politics. It would help us to decide collectively what we want and who we are. It would leave us with a clear, transparent, intelligible set of rights and powers. Who but a tyrant and his consiglieri would oppose it?
Of course, a constitution is no guarantee against autocracy, as the US is discovering. But it makes the would-be despot’s job much harder, and equips us with the tools to push back. Maintaining our tangled, opaque settlement is an elite project. Replacing it with a codified version is democracy’s work.
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George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
