This is the time of year when there is much political reflection. The Queen’s Christmas message this year was one of Her Majesty’s best. Whilst not everyone listens avidly to our Monarch’s words, the tone and its conciliatory notes encourage sanguine thoughts.
I wish the Queen long life and look forward to a reign that significantly exceeds that of Queen Victoria, or even Louis le Grand.
The effects on the psyche of the United Kingdom of the Queen’s long reign undoubtedly run deep, especially in providing a canopy of permanence and stability. In today’s ephemeral world of celebrity, it is almost certainly fair to say that monarchists and anti-monarchists alike possess cognizance of the Queen’s remarkable behind-the-scenes subtlety and wisdom.
My New Year reflection is that there are strong arguments in favour of starting the development in 2014 of a special constitutional law – which brings together the current complex web of UK constitutional customs, quasi-constitutional legislation, and historical precedents, into a Únited Kingdom Constitution.
Such a project is likely to take more than a decade to complete, and there are significant stability-orientated reasons why such a process should best occur under this ‘canopy’ and in the presence of such ‘cognizance’. If such matters are brushed under the carpet and away from public view, any poorly-planned shorter term efforts are likely to have extremely serious effects on UK economic stability.
There would be potential threats to the nation’s role as a global financial & scientific centre and as a pivotal United Nations Security Council power in global security and governance, if public desire for constitutional clarity became dangerously messy.
There are many arguments in favour of a consolidated special UK constitutional law. I refer to three.
Firstly, whichever way the Scottish and EU-membership referenda go, there will be acquired a public taste for questioning the current constitutional system. The problem here is that the UK is not only one of three countries in the world without formal special constitutional law, it is also a country where the vast majority of its population know almost nothing about its constitutional structures, making for very serious unpredictability. How many people know what Orders in Council are, how treaties & legislation interact, or how the functions of the Head of State are exercised in practice?
Secondly, whilst nevertheless in need of major systemic reform, the UK has a military which is admired by the rest of the world with often astonishing capability given its budgets. The general public is acutely – but politely – aware that it has been deployed in three recent conflicts where the outcomes have been broadly negative – Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. Whilst the military are not necessarily the cause of the ‘failure’ (see my Huffington Post article on South Sudan), the public have sought better control over decisions to commit the UK military to new conflicts, and the Syria parliamentary debate was an earthquake in constitutional terms. It is irresponsible, and disrespectful to our military, to just let his issue loiter around.
Finally, with some transatlantic encouragement, the UK administrative system has been insufficiently resisted by the political and legal classes when ancient public protections have been chipped away at. Furious judges have been treated with some disdain for questioning why certain trials should be held in secret – and where both charges and evidence are withheld from defendants. Senior counsel have also publicly worried whether in some international cases, the ‘legalities are being fixed around the policy’. The disquiet among the UK’s senior legal figures has been gathering momentum. Absence of recourse to consolidated special constitutional law is starting to create a simmering crisis.
So my reflection for 2014 is that in the national interest, I wish to encourage the UK’s administrative and military elite, and our rival political parties, to consider carefully these arguments for constitutional development sooner rather than later.
* Paul Reynolds works with multilateral organisations as an independent adviser on international relations, economics, and senior governance.