Humble Gordon. I don’t think so. The next prime minister is planning the biggest constitutional earthquake since 1689, when a bill of rights made “Britain,” as he once noted, “the first country successfully to assert the power of Parliament over the King.” Now Round 2 is starting.
George W. Bush’s slip, in which he placed Her Majesty’s last US visit in 1776, is nothing compared to Brown’s wish to rework royal history. The reform program he is hatching will give some prerogative powers of the head of state to Parliament standing above government and the crown. The monarch will be effectively demoted; Brown will be abolishing the divine right of kings.
Not that he or the queen, who might or might not have been consulted, would dream of putting it so crudely. This is a very British revolution. Brown has circumnavigated Britishness like a Morris dancer lumbering round a maypole. He has never, in his quest to bolster national identity, gone down the route of those who think citizenship should be given only to those who can quote from Beowulf or say how many holes there are in a crumpet.
Even so, Brown’s message has been underestimated. His speech to the Fabians, in January last year, was mostly reported as a call to reclaim the flag from the BNP. In fact, the lecture was a search for a set of values that would forge some bond between the potential jihadist and the Surrey golfer and lure people back to politics. Vitally, it also gave notice of a “new constitutional settlement,” a move greeted with all the torpor you would expect.
Brown’s dentistry, his questionable Arctic monkey-mania and the fact that his hairdresser was called Kevin all elicited more interest than any wish to be the founding father of a British constitution. Almost no one grasped Brown’s ambition or knew his timetable. The first clue came last week, when Jack Straw, imagining that he was speaking privately, expressed his new enthusiasm for a written British constitution.
The openDemocracy website interpreted the remark by Brown’s campaign manager to mean that the boss also favored such a plan. Others were more skeptical.
Since then, Brown has signaled his eagerness, but the scope of his plans will startle even hopeful reformers. Insiders say that in the first weeks, or even days, of his premiership, he is likely to announce a national consultation leading to a British bill of rights. The result will not be the rights-lite version touted by David Cameron as an alternative to the Human Rights Act. This will be HRA-plus, in which Britons get extra safeguards on race relations and equality and the bill is more tightly ring-fenced against interference from any future government. Jury trial, a more extensive right to education and to free health care (and, I hope, much-neglected children’s rights) might all be included.
Today’s must-have protections can become yesterday’s fad or tomorrow’s curse, as the Americans have discovered with guns. But finding a durable list is only the start. There is also a new mood for the written constitution previously deemed unthinkable. Brown’s view is that such a thing already exists and so it does. There’s the Magna Carta, the Act of Settlement of 1701 and much more, inscribed on vellum and the backs of envelopes down the ages. For coherent narrative, however, you would be better off with Coleen McLoughlin’s memoir. The Brown idea is to codify the constitution by joining all the scraps together, in as few as 16 pages, whereupon you would spot and remove the absurdities, such as the multitasking attorney general. Oxford students have done just such a drafting exercise for a book on constitutional issues published last week by the Smith Institute.
Ironing out anomalies will lead, sooner rather than later, to the crown. The queen’s sphere of influence includes opening and dissolving Parliament, giving royal assent and appointing the prime minister. Other powers include declaring war, conferring honors and agreeing international treaties. Much of her unaccountable might is on loan to the prime minister. In a move resisted fiercely both by Tony Blair and by the new (and highly unconstitutional) justice secretary, Lord Falconer, Brown would relinquish it to Parliament, so curbing his own power but also acknowledging that it is in no one’s interest for the monarchy to be able, even theoretically, to make ultrapolitical decisions.
The government, and the crown, would be placed beneath the overarching power of Parliament. While this may not create much of a frisson down at the Dog and Duck or even over the Buckingham Palace breakfast Tupperware, reformers and republicans will rejoice. Britons, lifted from subservience, would at last be citizens, not subjects, freed from the anachronistic legacy of ruthless monarchs. Obviously, the House of Windsor will stay, for as long as we want it. But the head of state would be answerable not to God and his or her own whims but to Parliament and to the people. The prime minister will also be restrained. No premier would ever again be able, for example, to set up a Ministry of Justice without asking Parliament’s permission or half-abolish, in a Paul Daniels flourish, the lord chancellor while mangling the House of Lords.
Britain stands alone, apart from Israel and New Zealand, in having no written constitution. True, there has been some progress. The home secretary, is for example, no longer required to attend royal births and monarchs cannot follow George III’s example, harsh even by the standards of the football premiership, of firing six prime ministers in a decade.
But change is vital to curb government diktat and, perhaps, the political ambitions of the next king.
The judges are fearful for their independence and the relationship between a new Supreme Court and Parliament is uncharted in Blair’s rubbish skip of constitutional debris. Protecting inalienable rights, in an age of eroded civil liberties, is more vital than at almost any point in history.
Some written constitutions are born out of lost wars, as in Germany and Japan, or from revolution, as with France and the US. Others follow the implosion of previous systems of government, as in South Africa or the Soviet Union. And sometimes, a new settlement is not inscribed in blood, but traced in the dust of a nation that has lost touch with who it is, what it stands for and who is in charge. Mending that broken machinery of state may enrage traditionalists and glaze a floating voter’s eye. Gordon Brown might fail. But if he succeeds, he will have done more than accomplish a mission he has been planning since Blair came to power. He will have mapped out the future of Britain for many centuries to come.
