Martin Meenagh blog

   It has been just over a month since Mary Elizabeth ‘Liz’ Truss became the last prime minister of Her Late Majesty’s reign, and the first of King Charles’. What have we learned?   Constitutional Matters From a constitutional point of view, the famous ‘unwritten conventions’ of the British state have been put under severe strain. Truss is the fourth Prime Minister to lead a Conservative administration since 2015, and the second not to have won her majority in a general election. Such situations are not meant to overly trouble the state, since the conventional wisdom is that the Conservative Party won the 2019 election, not Boris Johnson, and so the mandate to govern from the electorate belongs to the party, not a person. This is not a novel idea, and not in itself problematic. Of the past twenty Prime Ministers, Truss, Johnson, May, Brown, Major, Callaghan, Home, Macmillan, Eden, Churchill, Chamberlain, Baldwin, and Bonar Law all became Prime Minister in such a...

  The short answer to the question is that Article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon allowed a state to leave. Such an answer raises the question of why the United Kingdom has, so far, been the only state to invoke and execute the right to leave under the article. The reasons why some of the poorest and most deprived areas of the United Kingdom led it out of the EU on June 23, 2016, are complicated and do not fit into an easy chronological or legal order. From the very broadest point of view, membership of the Union, and the Community before it, was a limitation on the freedom of the House of Commons to legislate and represented a second sovereignty in the UK. It is very tempting to take a ‘grand sweep of history’ approach and to note that the Westminster regime has never dealt well with alternative sovereignties. The claims of the Catholic church were expunged in 1533, for instance, as were those of Wales to separate treatment; the Irish parliament was subordinated to Poyning’s law, ...

  On June 23 rd 2016, a majority of voters in the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. This was effected after two general elections and a protracted debate on January 31 2020. The United Kingdom is now outside of the Union but in a Trade and Cooperation Agreement with it, parts of which are still not fully defined. This agreement carries with arrangements of mutual benefit to both sides but does not include the UK in EU decision structures, the customs union, the single market, or the free trade area. The UK is in a series of separate agreements with the Irish government which causes there to be a border issue on the island of Ireland.   Article 50 and Referenda in the UK The means by which the UK transitioned from the status of EU membership was initiated by the existence of Article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon. This article was, ironically, inserted by the British permanent representative to the EC, Sir John Kerr, in the belief that it would not be invoke...

  In the eighteenth century, an idea arose that Britain benefitted from a style of open and relatively restrained government which came to be known two hundred years later as the ‘Westminster system.’ This ‘Ancient Constitution’ was, the theory went, gifted with a supreme flexibility, and was subject to only a few rules, which were socially enforced. A central one was that parliament was central, and the source of absolute sovereignty. Whether the existence of this sovereignty meant that the monarch and the Crown were different was left to interpretation as an ‘ornamental’ rather than practical question by the mid nineteenth century. A second rule, that a parliament could not bind a future parliament, and therefore could not adopt a written constitution, was also upheld, particularly by the likes of Alexander Venn Dicey, Vinerian Professor of Law at Oxford and a Liberal Unionist, which caused him to write all sorts of nonsense about constitutionalism which has bedeviled law ever ...

  The Cabinet Secretary in the twentieth century.   Walking down Whitehall, from Trafalgar Square down to the House of Parliament, an outside visitor might be forgiven for thinking that the central offices of the domestic UK state are adjuncts of the Cabinet Office. In fact, the Office, which is responsible to the Prime Minister as Minister for the Civil Service, has been since 1963 the base of the Cabinet Secretary, an extraordinarily powerful position within the civil service. Between 1916 and 2002, for instance, four of the six men who were Cabinet Secretary bar two (Sir Burke Trend and Sir John Hunt between 1963 and 1979) were Heads of the Home Civil Service. Several were also Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, one was Clerk to the Privy Council, and all were co-ordinators of the Intelligence services.   Officially anonymous, objective, independent, and non-partisan, the Cabinet Secretary of the day advised each of the twenty prime ministers of the twentieth c...