Constitutional Reform and the Coalition Government
| Author | Nick Gallop |
| Date | 01 April 2012 |
| DOI | 10.1111/j.2041-9066.2012.00098.x |
| Published date | 01 April 2012 |
| Subject Matter | Feature |
Why did the traditional constitution fall
out of favour so rapidly? Why, despite a
commitment to wholesale reform, did
successive Labour administrations fail to
settle upon a new constitutional model for
the UK? Why, and with what likely conse-
quences, is constitutional reform so high
upon the Conservative-dominated coalition
government’s political agenda?
Constitution under Pressure
The broad consensus of support for the
constitution and for the interplay between
key institutions of state centred on a widely
held view that its strengths – those of
durability, evolution, adaptability and the
fashioning of an organic body of rules to
reflect the deepest values and ideals of its
people – were of supreme value. So exactly
when and why the UK fell out of love with
its constitution is the subject of intense
debate. Perhaps the key lies in what Vernon
Bogdanor (2009) explains as ‘a striking loss
of national self-confidence … reflected in a
loss of confidence in our institutions and
in our constitutional arrangements’ – all
occurring amidst worrying social and eco-
nomic pressures that served to marginalise
any form of genuine constitutional debate.
At the heart of this lack of popular dis-
course, writes Peter Hennessey in The Hidden
Wiring (1995), laid an obstructive sense of
deference bordering upon indifference
among the British people towards their con-
stitutional arrangements. Hennessey notes
that ‘the British … have been profoundly
uncurious about the rules under which the
hugely important “national game” of politics
and government are played’, which he puts
it down to ‘a powerful combination of smug-
ness, insularity and sheer incomprehension’.
The failure to find effective, lasting
solutions to the UK’s social and economic
Constitutional Reform and
The Coalition Government
Well, it works, doesn’t it? So I think that’s
the answer, even if it is on the back of
an envelope and doesn’t have a written
constitution with every comma and every
semi-colon in place. Because sometimes
they can make for difficulties that common
sense can overcome.
Delivered in 1991, Lord Callaghan’s
ponderous but charitable homage to
the character of the UK’s traditional
constitutional arrangements echoed count-
less other tributes, tendered over several
centuries, to the rules that governed the UK.
Sound and Lasting Institutions
For many constitutional commentators
it was not simply that the traditional UK
constitution worked. From the pomp and
pageantry of seventeenth century England
to the bleak post-war landscape of a previ-
ous age of austerity, constitutional arrange-
ments, emphatically confirmed by Edward
Shils in his 1972 text The Intellectuals and
the Powers, were declared to be ‘as nearly
perfect as a human institution can be’.
And yet in the two decades since Calla-
ghan’s ‘it works’ verdict, the UK constitution
has been subject to the most rapid and radical
reform ever witnessed. Changes have had an
impact on almost every aspect of the political
process and the functioning of the UK state,
from the organisation of central, regional
and local government to the everyday rights
that citizens enjoy. Now, with a coalition
government – historic and constitutionally
ambiguous in equal measure – constitutional
reform sits atop the political agenda once
more. Reforming, reshaping, renewing – of
the legislature, the union and civil rights –
remain the watchwords of reformers faced
with a constitution of unsettled shape that
is uneven and, at crucial times, unhelpful.
The reformist agenda has become a familiar feature of the UK’s ongoing constitutional turbulence, but it wasn’t
always so. Nick Gallop charts a course through the UK’s recent constitutional past and asks whether, under the
current coalition government, we are any closer to a constitutional settlement.
difficulties between the 1950s and 1980s
resulted in escalating doubts about whether
the institutions themselves were adequate
to meet the challenges of the modern
world. This crisis of national confidence was
accompanied by a sequence of events that
tested the existing constitutional arrange-
ments to the limit, challenging the very
framework of the state.
The centralisation and consolidation of
executive power was a process entirely at
odds with traditional understandings of the
distribution of power in the state. The UK’s
‘membership’ of Europe saw the erosion of
principles such as parliamentary sovereignty
in the face of a supranational organisation
with its own sovereignty in key areas of
policy and law. Meanwhile the rapid decline
of traditional ways of governing and of gov-
ernment accountability, the rise of quangos
and the privatisation of many publicly owned
industries resulted in the steady loss of faith
in arrangements that seemed to support an
increasingly discredited political system.
In short, the informal nature of the tradi-
tional constitutional arrangements proved
incapable of resisting profound, destabilis-
ing shifts in the relationship between the
institutions of government and in the
political processes that underpinned them.
New Labour
The sheer scope of New Labour’s reforms
makes finding comparatively similar peri-
ods of constitutional upheaval remarkably
difficult (see Table 1). Indeed, the list of
changes to the constitutional arrangements
of the UK made between 1997 and 2010
is as impressive as it is wide-ranging. It
includes the creation of a supreme court,
devolved assemblies with new electoral sys-
tems, a reformed House of Lords, freedom
of information legislation and statutory
34 Political Insight
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