Martin Meenagh blog

  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, ...

  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...