Vernon Bogdanor, Beyond Brexit: Towards a British Constitution
| DOI | 10.3366/elr.2020.0637 |
| Pages | 305-307 |
| Date | 01 May 2020 |
| Author | |
| Published date | 01 May 2020 |
The book under review is a monograph on Brexit by leading constitutional scholar Vernon Bogdanor. The title of the book,
Brexit has proven to be fast-moving and often unpredictable. Events have inevitably moved on since mid-2018, as well as since the book's publication in early 2019, thus leaving notable gaps in the book's coverage. Most significantly, the UK formally left the European Union on 31 January 2020, more than three and half years after a majority of the electorate voted to leave. Although the Brexit process had seemingly stalled, with the House of Commons and the UK Government at loggerheads over the issue, the Conservatives’ election victory in December 2019 gave Boris Johnson an overall majority and the mandate he needed to deliver on his election promise to “Get Brexit Done”.
Such developments, however, do not diminish the value of the book, nor render Bogdanor's arguments obsolete. Although Brexit is the lynchpin of the book, tying the different strands of Bogdanor's argument together, the book is principally concerned with broader, more substantive questions concerning the origins, development and future of the British constitution, all of which remain open irrespective of recent events. Potential readers, therefore, should not be dissuaded from the book on the basis of its publication date.
Bogdanor's hypothesis is that Brexit could constitute Britain's “constitutional moment”, where its historical constitution is replaced with a codified one. Far from turning back the clock to the pre-1973 constitutional position, Bogdanor argues instead that Brexit will give rise to two major constitutional problems – the future of rights protection and the relationship between the UK Government and the devolved governments – both of which can only be resolved by abandoning the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty and adopting a codified constitution (x-xi). The book thus seeks to prove this hypothesis, with each of the seven substantive chapters focused on a particular aspect of Britain's troubled relationship with the EU and the constitutional consequences which have arisen from it.
Chapter one, entitled “Britain and Europe: The Poisoned Chalice”, is a whistle-stop...
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