Labour’s ‘New Britain’ Constitution Will End Parliamentary Democracy

In theory, Britain is the most democratic country in the world. There has never been any limit to what an elected Parliament and a royal signature can do. The obstructions to an elected majority only exist by the sufferance of this power, and could be abolished at will. The ‘Rule of Law’, whatever that means, does not rule in Britain – Parliament does. Glance at the alternatives, at provincial Hawaiian judges vetoing federal border policies as a matter of course. Not so in Britain. Tomorrow, Parliamentary sovereignty could abolish the Supreme Court. It could abolish the BBC, or the Human Rights Act, or Whitehall itself. 

This power has seldom been exercised. But that is scarcely the point. It exists – more than that – it burns, white hot, at the centre of national life. We’ve caught tantalising glimpses of it before, when Britain’s membership of the EU was brought to an end with a single vote of the legislature.

This counts for more than a little. President Trump attempting to exercise some kind of federal veto over a Californian gender self-ID law would have instantly spawned a national crisis; in Britain, something exactly analogous passed off with little more than a shrug. 

Parliament’s status means that Britain is uniquely capable of carrying out the kind of course corrections that healthy democracies have to make from time to time. New Labour and its heirs fear this above all else. They are right to. Accordingly, the main thrust of their constitutional programme has been to destroy Parliament and its powers. Curiously absent from contemporary lowing about institutions and the need to defend them is Westminster itself. Established Britain believes that bureaucrats and seamy quangos are beyond criticism, but has over the past 25 years outsourced many of Parliament’s powers, and has removed its judicial function entirely. Weekly proposals emerge to chop, change and transform it out of all recognition, into some kind of rigmarole of Estates – half feudal, half Dr. Seuss. Assemblies of the North. Assemblies of Great British High Street Heroes. An Assembly of the Nations, Regions, Auntie Beeb and Richard Osman. Assemblies of the ‘Head, Heart, and Hand’. An Assembly of the Potteries. An Assembly for Young People (aged 33).

The proposals of Keir Starmer’s ‘A New Britain‘ constitution, written up by Gordon Brown, are designed to destroy Parliament forever – and by extension anything approaching popular sovereignty in Britain. These are: the subordination of Parliament to the judiciary; universal English devolution; the reorganisation of Britain as a multi-national state; and the enshrining of the current social order as a constitution.

‘A New Britain’ will close off any route to democratic change. Blairite society, threatened by new adversaries, and, still more, by new technologies for sharing information, seeks to preserve its waning powers by transforming the U.K. into an ungovernable, ramshackle outfit on the pattern of late Poland-Lithuania or the Holy Roman Empire. A series of legal devices will be cooked up to prevent any change from our trajectory towards mediocrity and impoverishment. 

Consider small boats. Under the current system, a reforming Government could solve the problem of illegal immigration tomorrow. It could legislate to make the Rwanda scheme legal, or leave the ECHR, or declare a state of emergency. This would require a simple majority in the House of Commons, or, in extremis, the creation of several hundred new peers. With ‘A New Britain’ and judicial review, the issue will be taken entirely out of elected hands; judges will simply enforce the principle that every human is entitled to live in a Western country.

The Brown-Starmer proposals will throw the slow recovery of the British union into reverse. Under this system, it will be declared that Britain is a Union of Nations: four discrete legal entities that can enter or leave the arrangement at any time, and that can conduct something approaching an independent foreign policy. No country recognises a right to unilateral secession, but ‘A New Britain’ will create the legal basis for just this. A nationalist devolved administration would have the legal standing to demand a referendum on independence, under a jerrymandered franchise of its choosing. 

‘A New Britain’ will strengthen the forces of bureaucracy at every level of life. New and empowered devolved administrations in England will create tens of thousands of jobs for the political class. Each will have a permanent staff, bureaucracy and network of quangos and taxpayer-funded NGOs. The ranks of English devolved Government will be filled by the same curtain-twitchers, village solicitors and local tyrants that form the officer class of the SNP and Plaid Cymru – an enthroned Jackie Weaver in every town hall. Nor will there be any escape from these people. ‘A New Britain’ contains an explicit promise that Westminster will not infringe on the powers of local government, or even reduce its budgets without three years prior notice.

In London, the long battle between the elected power and the bureaucracy is finally to be settled in the latter’s favour. ‘A New Britain’ will remove an elected Government’s ability to fire officials or abolish departments, and will instead give Whitehall a statutory existence. These will no longer be individuals that the state happens to employ to carry out its business, and will instead harden into a permanent caste of noblesse de robe.

Finally, the proposals would codify a set of ‘Social Rights’ that will attempt to transform the particular assumptions of Britain’s media class in the 2020s into eternal principles of national life. This ‘rights package’ would, again, be placed beyond the power of a parliamentary majority to change. Chief among these Social Rights is a guarantee of healthcare free at the point of use – in other words, the particular health bureaucracy that was established in 1948. Immigrants to Britain are to gain a constitutional right to welfare payments under this system, as the Social Right to not live in poverty will extend to “every person legitimately present in the U.K.”

Constitutions are not meant for enshrining fiscal decisions, and it is the very thought that they might which shows why this whole exercise is so troubling. It is no exaggeration to say that the British establishment in 2023 does not believe in politics. The idea of popular sovereignty is almost non-existent. There is no instinctive grasp of the pull-and-push of democratic society, the idea that national life turns on appeals, coalitions, rhetoric – which are all uniformly dismissed as ‘division’. Instead of debating issues on their merits, they instead consult the rulebook to find the right answer: “our commitments”; “our international obligations”; “the Government’s own code of ethics”; the “Nolan Principles”. This is a group of people who have only recently figured out that politicians lie. This is a group of people who convened a committee to investigate parliamentary deception; found the defendant guilty; arraigned the defendant again for having misled them by presenting an unsuccessful defence; and then declared that any criticism of the committee’s proceedings is tantamount to criminal harassment. This is a group of people who have all the democratic consciousness of Croat gentry in pre-March. ‘A New Britain’ will not create the separation of powers as seen in Japan, or Germany, or the United States – only an oligarchy that is genuinely perplexed and enraged by the concept of political opposition. 

With ‘A New Britain’, there will no longer be any necessary link between votes and actions, nor will there be any recognition that people are entitled to disagree with a series of subjective moral ideas. Liberal democracy as we know it will cease to exist, and we will plunge deeper into crisis, barred by law from pursuing any alternative.

The current system of parliamentary democracy is worth everything. It does not currently have many apologists. But it should. It is not, as critics allege, a medieval anachronism. It is the precise opposite. If we define secular modernity as the idea that the world is what we make of it, and that we are not bound by unfalsifiable spirits and spooks, then it is the most modern system of government going. It allows us to choose, to act, to create, to destroy, to change – there is no earthly rulebook to consult; there is nothing to consult but ourselves. 

These proposals would end this great contest, and replace it with a society that is now obligated by law to sink into poverty and decline. Those who may wish for something other than the whims of Gordon Brown, Matt Chorley and Ayesha Hazarika should oppose ‘A New Britain’, or they will soon find any alternative to it closed off.

A petition for a referendum on Starmer’s proposals can be signed here.