A spring conference rarely grabs the national headlines. It is typically a chance for party faithful to shore themselves up before a local election, and party officials to take a weekend away. It’s why much of Ed Davey’s spring conference speech last week floated under the national radar, bar the odd headline about the Liberal Democrats’ new nuclear strategy. Ignored by much of the commentary on the speech though, was a commitment to bring in a written constitution.
Davey’s Magna Carta, as he humbly described it, is supposedly designed to ‘enshrine the rights we have asserted over generations’, while ‘protecting our democracy from foreign interference – whether that’s Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin’, ensuring Britain is ‘resistant to the authoritarian creep we see in other countries’.
The salience of constitutional questions certainly cannot be ignored. As the hereditary peers bow out of the Lords and David Lammy takes a sledgehammer to jury trials, ensuring our constitution is fit for purpose is a relevant question for any serious political party. But the Lib Dem leader’s claim that codification is the answer is not only misguided, but also fails to recognise the damage constitutional tinkering has wreaked on our politics over the past 30 years.
Even on his own terms, Davey’s logic doesn’t stack up. He claims the main benefit of a written constitution would be halting the potential co-opting of government by authoritarian tendencies. Yet given that one of Davey’s main examples for authoritarian creep is Trump’s America – a nation with a famously codified constitution – the claim that up-ending our current constitutional arrangements is an essential safeguard seems unconvincing at best.
Parliamentary process, both in statute and through convention, has proven itself more than effective at blocking legislation it deems damaging to British democracy. Even a relatively minor reform like the proposed removal of the winter fuel allowance forced the Government to U-turn instead of facing a loss in the Commons. The Assisted Dying Bill has in part been such a mess because it is a bill without public mandate.
Davey also claims that under his new Magna Carta we would be better able to enshrine human rights, secure the independence of the judiciary and further guarantee universal healthcare. Yet it is hard to see how a new constitutional settlement would particularly help. The NHS is already protected from any meaningful reform by its golden calf status. Our judges are notoriously independent of political interference, at least from the Right. It’s true, admittedly, that restoring free speech in the UK by implementing an equivalent of America’s First Amendment would be a great victory for human rights. But it’s hard to imagine that being high on the Lib Dem agenda.
Instead, the main tenet of Davey’s new constitutional order is proportional representation. What a shocker. This is a self-serving measure that puts the political interests of smaller parties before any pretence at principled reform.
The reality is that we are already dealing with the consequences of ill-thought-through, piecemeal and politicised reforms of our longstanding, unwritten constitutional traditions. Blairite devolution, and the Cameroon ‘Big Society’ which followed, initiated a trend by which national government hands various powers to various bodies in a manner akin to a stressed parent handing a packet of sweets to their child to get them to shut up. The Supreme Court is functionally the same as the law lords of old, while also opening up major questions around parliamentary sovereignty by making parliament both above and below the court simultaneously. So often when constitutional changes are made, they are done out of an abstract desire for ‘modernisation’, even when there is little certainty they will bring any benefits at all.
A codified constitution could potentially tackle the problems that piecemeal reform has already caused. But the Liberal Democrats are not proposing anything so useful. Instead, Ed Davey’s vision is akin to a new Human Rights Act with proportional representation attached. If constitutional reform is something the Lib Dems are going to seriously discuss, modernisation for the sake of it is not enough. They need to provide a sophisticated answer to why the existing constitutional settlement is not serving British interests.
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