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 ...
This is a collection of personal and largely unedited observations covering the years from 2006 to now; I assert my copyright but am fine with links and footnotes. Some posts are obviously much more researched than others, and any errors are wholly mine except where I have innocently disseminated or linked to other bloggers or commentators.