Free lecture on Britain’s new constitution

Coming up this week in central London is a lecture by Vernon Bogdanor, Professor of Politics at Oxford, and author of a new book assessing the impact and significance of the huge raft of reforms to our country’s constitution that have taken place in recent years.

This lecture forms part of the series of events taking place as part of the free public lectures programme from Gresham College.

According to the Gresham website:

“The last decade has seen radical changes in the way we are governed. Reforms such as the Human Rights Act and devolution have led to the replacement of one constitutional order by another. Professor Bogdanor’s book is the first to describe and analyse Britain’s new constitution, asking why it was that the old system, seemingly hallowed by time, came under challenge, and why it is being replaced.

The Human Rights Act and the devolution legislation have the character of fundamental law. They in practice limit the rights of Westminster as a sovereign parliament, and establish a constitution which is quasi-federal in
nature. The old constitution emphasised the sovereignty of Parliament. The new constitution, by contrast, emphasises the separation of powers, both territorially and at the centre of government.

The aim of constitutional reformers has been to improve the quality of government. But the main weakness of the new constitution is that it does little to secure more popular involvement in politics. We are in the process of becoming a constitutional state, but not a popular constitutional state. The next phase of constitutional reform, therefore, is likely to involve the creation of new forms of democratic engagement, so that our constitutional forms come to be more congruent with the social and political forces of the age. The end-point of this piecemeal process might well be a fully codified or written constitution which declares that power stems not from the Queen-in Parliament, but, instead, as in so many constitutions, from ‘We, the People’.”

Tuesday 15 September, 6pm at Barnard’s Inn Hall.

I’ll certainly be strongly encouraging my students to avail themselves of this opportunity to hear a talk by one of the most important thinkers on UK constitutional politics.

I haven’t seen anything on the LSE’s lectures programme that is as directly related to the Politics syllabus as this, but when there is I’ll post details here. Though on the Economics front surely students should be excited by the prospect of seeing Steven Levitt at the launch of his new book in Novermber.