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Sources of the UK Constitution
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The Constitution of the United Kingdom
In this course, Dr Matthew Cole (University of Birmingham) explores the British constitution. In the first module, we think about the four sources of the British constitution – legislation, conventions, treaties and authoritative works – as well as the flexibility of the constitution compared to other, fully codified constitutions. In the second and third modules, we think about some of the advantages and disadvantages of the British constitution being in the form that it is, before turning in the fourth and final module to think about some of the ways in which the British constitution has changed in the last thirty years.
Sources of the UK Constitution
In this module, we think about the four sources of the British constitution – legislation, conventions, treaties and authoritative works – as well as the flexibility of the British constitution compared to the US Constitution.
Hi, I'm Matt Cole.
00:00:05I teach history at the University of Birmingham,
00:00:07and I'm also a visiting fellow of the Hansard Society.
00:00:10I'm going to talk in this series of short modules about the British Constitution,
00:00:15its advantages and disadvantages
00:00:20and possibly its future.
00:00:22The British Constitution, unlike most others, is a NCAA defied.
00:00:25That means it is not written into a single document, although parts of it are written
00:00:30if you like.
00:00:36Like the rules of the game and the Constitution is a set of rules for decision making.
00:00:38Uh,
00:00:43most constitutions are like the rules you see written on
00:00:44the inside of the lid of a board game.
00:00:47You are given them, and you have to abide by them.
00:00:49The rules of the British Constitution are like the rules of a football game.
00:00:53You play in the park with your friends.
00:00:58They can be flexible, they can change. Most of them, are just understood
00:01:00and don't need any
00:01:06further or further authorisation than that.
00:01:07Whether that's a good system,
00:01:11we have to think about
00:01:13where those rules come from,
00:01:15is what I'm going to examine Now.
00:01:17There are four sources of the British constitution.
00:01:19The first
00:01:23is legislation
00:01:24There are many laws which we can identify which
00:01:26make the rules about who governs the country.
00:01:29Uh, the representation of people act, for example, decide who can vote, uh,
00:01:32the legislation for devolution the Scotland and Wales act,
00:01:39the legislation governing local government or setting up
00:01:43the Supreme Court and setting out its powers.
00:01:46All of these are laws passed by Parliament in the usual way,
00:01:48which decide who has power in Britain
00:01:53when we want to refer back to whether something
00:01:57is a decision for local government or national government.
00:01:59We look at the legislation which set up the local government,
00:02:02and we decide from there
00:02:05legislation is relatively easy to change.
00:02:08It takes only the normal series of votes in
00:02:10the House of Commons and the House of Lords,
00:02:13and they can usually be driven forward by the government of the day.
00:02:16And most of the visible elements of the Constitution can be seen in those.
00:02:19The second source of the Constitution in Britain is conventions.
00:02:25Nobody quite knows how many conventions there
00:02:30are because they're not always written down.
00:02:32Conventions are assumptions,
00:02:36their rules that have developed by being established
00:02:38as a precedent by being repeatedly observed.
00:02:41We know these include, for example,
00:02:44the idea of collective responsibility that
00:02:47cabinets have to publicly defend what the
00:02:50majority of them or the mood of the Cabinet has decided in private,
00:02:54even if they don't personally agree with it.
00:02:59Uh, they also include, for example, the method of appointing a prime minister.
00:03:01Prime ministers are not appointed by direct election like American presidents,
00:03:07uh,
00:03:12they're chosen because they are able to command a majority in the House of Commons.
00:03:12But there have been prime ministers who were not leaders
00:03:19of the largest party in the House of Commons.
00:03:22There have been prime ministers who were barely in any party at all,
00:03:24like Lloyd George, for example,
00:03:29and so identifying the person who has the majority support can be difficult.
00:03:31In 2010, for instance,
00:03:36it was possible that Gordon Brown could have remained the prime minister
00:03:38had he been able to win the support of the Liberal Democrats.
00:03:42So the convention is that the leader of the majority
00:03:46party in the House of Commons becomes prime minister.
00:03:51But the application of the convention can be difficult,
00:03:54and sometimes particularly in terms of war or economic crisis,
00:03:58it can make sense to modify
00:04:02or to amend
00:04:05the convention.
00:04:07The third source of the British constitution is treaties.
00:04:10There are a relatively limited number of treaties which
00:04:14changed the way decisions are made in Britain.
00:04:18The most obvious example is the Treaty of Rome,
00:04:20by which we joined the European Union According to the Treaty of Rome,
00:04:23decisions made in European law supersede those passed in
00:04:28the House of Commons and the House of Lords.
00:04:32So the principle of parliamentary sovereignty established as part
00:04:34of the Constitution over many centuries was that actually modified
00:04:38by saying that where there is a conflict between
00:04:42European Union law and English law as for example,
00:04:45with the Marshall Case
00:04:49in which the Sex Discrimination Act came up against the
00:04:51equal treatment directive of the European Union,
00:04:58then the European Union law is superior and has to be applied in Britain.
00:05:00Treaties are relatively rare and even rarer
00:05:07in their impact on the British constitution.
00:05:11But they are the hardest part of the system to change.
00:05:13Treaties have to be renegotiated at length or abandoned altogether,
00:05:16and that has a significant impact on the country.
00:05:21Constitutional
00:05:24conventions are easy to change. You simply don't observe them.
00:05:26The last source of authority and what one,
00:05:31which is perhaps rarest and perhaps least visible,
00:05:34is what are called authoritative works.
00:05:37Um,
00:05:41the authority of works include perhaps the best known examples of Walter budgets,
00:05:42the English Constitution or a V dices,
00:05:48the law and the Constitution to Victorian books,
00:05:51which tried to set out the way in which British government was carried on,
00:05:54and to indicate the understandings by which we are ruled.
00:05:58The idea of collective Cabinet responsibility is very clearly set out in these.
00:06:05The idea of the sovereignty of Parliament is usually quoted from diocese,
00:06:09and in fact, the Supreme Court used dicey
00:06:12to try to determine its answer to the case of Miller versus the
00:06:15secretary of state in the Brexit Supreme Court case of January 2017.
00:06:19So these authority works are sometimes return to
00:06:26in an attempt to resolve constitutional questions,
00:06:30but they are usually used to corroborate a decision which is
00:06:35being changed or reinforced by one of the other sources.
00:06:39Already,
00:06:42the thing that all the all four of these have in common
00:06:44is that they are more flexible than most other countries constitutions,
00:06:47the United States Constitution for example,
00:06:52all written into one document originally crafted following the revolution.
00:06:54The Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia
00:07:00can only be changed by what's called an extraordinary procedure.
00:07:04In order to alter the American Constitution to guarantee someone's right to vote,
00:07:08for example,
00:07:12or to allow or prevent a certain sort of
00:07:12punishment in all states in the United States,
00:07:17you have to get two thirds of both houses of Congress
00:07:19and three quarters of the state legislatures within a limited space of time.
00:07:24That's why, unsurprisingly,
00:07:31there have only been 27 changes to the American Constitution,
00:07:3210 of which took place all at once.
00:07:36At the very beginning, it's very difficult to change written constitutions,
00:07:38which are codified into a single document and entrenched in this way.
00:07:43The British Constitution, as the
00:07:49legal
00:07:53scholar
00:07:55J. G. Griffith observed, is what happens
00:07:56that is very easy to change.
00:08:00Whether you want to change it or not is a different question.
00:08:02
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Cole, M. (2019, September 26). The Constitution of the United Kingdom - Sources of the UK Constitution [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/the-british-constitution/changing-the-constitution
MLA style
Cole, M. "The Constitution of the United Kingdom – Sources of the UK Constitution." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 26 Sep 2019, https://massolit.io/courses/the-british-constitution/changing-the-constitution