Honestly it's pretty scary how easy it is to pass such legislation in the UK.
That's what happens when there's no written concise framework of government but centuries of "tradition" and "precedent" that are improvised upon, and which have no special threshold of change (e.g. to change the constitution in some countries requires a special assembly, or qualified majority, or plebiscite, etc.).
The devil (as ever) is in the detail though. A "proper, written constitution" is of little value if the next parliament can just amend it.
People seem to look across the pond with envy at the US, neatly forgetting the completely different arrangements that make their constitution hard to amend, and also forgetting the problems that arise from having a hard-to-amend constitution (e.g. the second amendment).
I don't really think US is really the amazing freedom loving place they're supposed to be either. There is plenty of spying on citizens, repression of whistleblowers and the like. Luke at Snowden, he should be rewarded in a truly freedom loving society.
The illusion of freedom is there but I personally think it's really a small fraction of rich people doing pretty much whatever they damn well please with very little oversight and hope of more equality.
Sure, so if we're going all the way down the route of "parliament is no longer sovereign" and throwing away the principle that no parliament can bind a future parliament (which has been a bedrock principle for a good while now), then that's... a view, certainly.
I wonder why they don't lead their manifesto with the statement "we believe that parliament should no longer be sovereign"?
> that no parliament can bind a future parliament (which has been a bedrock principle for a good while now)
It's that the excuse the UK uses when it breaks international agreements? And I wonder how it works for the ones it hasn't broken (e.g. Good Friday) or stuff like debts.
And things existing "for a good while" is a shitty reason for them to continue existing. The same could be applied to the monarch, or the legal system.
> It's that the excuse the UK uses when it breaks international agreements? And I wonder how it works for the ones it hasn't broken (e.g. Good Friday) or stuff like debts.
Any country is free to break whatever treaties they previously signed. There's just usually consequences to doing so, which is why we still have peace in Northern Ireland.
> And things existing "for a good while" is a shitty reason for them to continue existing. The same could be applied to the monarch, or the legal system.
Oh I completely agree. It's just that if you want to re-invent the wheel, you need to be realistic about how much work and disruption will be involved, and the knock-on effects there will be.
I think people underestimate how much expertise and knowledge we have baked into our system based on these long-standing principles, and what we'd lose by throwing them away.
Reading these, it strongly smells like they started with the answer and then worked backwards. It's not at all clear how you can start from the enumerated of rights and end up with "replace the crown with an elected policitian".
Similarly, there's a lot of hand-waving and contradiction. "The will of the people should be the basis of the authority of government." contradicts "Citizens have the right to be protected from tyranny, whether the tyranny of one or the tyranny of the majority;". If the will of the people is to deport all black people, then which institution is going to protect them? What protects that institution from being dismantled by the will of the people?
I'm no monarchist, but the republican movement really needs to put a bit more effort in than that. This stuff is hard.
Can you give an example of a law being deemed unlawful on common law basis?
My understanding is that typically precedent is used in the absence of statute law and for the interpretation of statute law, so a new law will typically override older precedents.
Perhaps it's up to a judge to decide which takes precedence if two statutes contradict each other, but really that shouldn't happen (Parliament employs lawyers to check for that sort of thing) and if a statute states explicitly that it overrides an earlier one then it does so, as I understand it.
(I'm not a lawyer, not even a competent amateur, just interested in this stuff and hoping someone will correct my misunderstandings.)
Oh, that's a great basis. Some random lord sued another random merchant in the 16th century and a judge decided whatever, how very useful as a legal base upon which to decide modern things. (Like that story which is the basis of contract law about some ships a couple of centuries ago).
It's quite sad how obsolete and overcomplicated for no reason whatsoever (as in, to understand a case today, you have to go dig up precedents going back centuries to understand how they might impact this case; no wonder there's entire professions, software, AI assistants to help lawyers navigate this quagmire) common law is, and how countries have stuck with it.
> Some random lord sued another random merchant in the 16th century
I think the point of "common law" is that the precedents describe laws that people basically understand, and they expect that what governs their behaviour now is the law they understand.
Statute law, especially modern statute law, tends to be a mess of exceptions, definitions and cross-references. It's all legalese, and only an expert can understand it. Plus, it's all subject to intepretation by the courts, so precedent affects statute law as well as common law. And unlike statutes, most court precedents aren't publicly accessible, unless you have access to a law library or Westlaw.
If you expect people to obey the law, then you need to express it in ways that people can understand. If they don't know what the law is, you can't expect them to comply.
One of the nice things about the US constitution is that it's mostly written in fairly plain English. I suppose that might be why many non-Americans admire it. One of the nastiest things about it, though, is that its so damned difficult to change.
The scariest legislation happened during WW1/WW2. If there’s a majority in parliament for press censorship, banning strikes outright, or sending millions of men to France without regard for their will then there’s no legal or traditional limit on what a parliamentary majority can do.
Not sure how much of that can be blamed on the system - countries with written constitutions and enumerated rights (United States, France) also implemented drafts and massively restricted individual freedoms during the wars.
The US even went so far as to imprison the leader of the Socialist Party for his opposition to the WWI draft and urging resistance. He ran his final presidential campaign from a prison cell.
That's what happens when there's no written concise framework of government but centuries of "tradition" and "precedent" that are improvised upon, and which have no special threshold of change (e.g. to change the constitution in some countries requires a special assembly, or qualified majority, or plebiscite, etc.).