There is enough time left, just about, to fix parts of our constitutional arrangements before the next general election. This is important, as there is a non-trivial possibility of a radical illiberal majority at that general election.
Of course, given our (largely Victorian) doctrine of parliamentary supremacy, and given the general deference our courts give to the executive, there is little which could be ultimately done to prevent the damage which a radical illiberal majority could do.
But the damage could be slowed down significantly.
For example, our current constitutional arrangements make it easy for ministers and departments to change and make law by statutory instruments, without any meaningful parliamentary involvement.
Making such secondary legislation subject to a distinct process involving parliamentary consideration would at a stroke check any attempt by an incoming government to inflict a raft of Trump-style executive orders on day one. Eventually a new administration could get round this obstacle, but it would reduce the speed of the assault.
Similarly, making it easier for citizens to challenge disproportionate executive decisions and secondary legislation would similarly make it harder for a new government to push through excessive measures.
And there many other things that could be done too, from making public procurement more transparent, to giving teeth (or even a tooth) to freedom of information laws, to limiting the powers of a new Prime Minister to create peers.
We could do so much strengthen the roof before this incoming storm. There may not, of course, be a storm. Maybe everything is going to be ok. Nonetheless, it would be worth doing anyway.
But we will not do any of this, even with three years to go of the current parliament, a period which provides more than enough time to force things through the House of Lords if need be.
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Over at Prospect I have reviewed an interesting paper by the Constitution Unit at University College London: Safeguarding the Constitution: Key Steps to Strengthen UK Democratic Resilience.
It is a paper well worth reading, and if TL;DR you can read a summary here.
There are some good proposals in there, and some nice-to-haves, but as I set out at Prospect, I think the recommendations are incomplete.
And as aver at the end of that article: our constitutional arrangements are vulnerable, and it is complacent to think otherwise.
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Given the supremacy of Parliament, how can those Parliament tie the hands of subsequent Parliaments?
My minimal understanding indicates that one constitutional pillar is that no Parliament can prevent a subsequent Parliament from overruling previous Acts of Parliament?
One thing that we should be doing is publicly funding lawyers so that everyone has access to them rather than just the rich. It's mind-boggling that this idea is absent from political discourse, even on the left, because it's an almost perfect analogue of healthcare. Everybody gets healthcare under the NHS because everybody gets sick and everybody deserves access to the medical care required to cure or mitigate it.
Likewise, everybody is subject to the law and everybody deserves justice under the law, and so it follows that everybody is entitled to access to the legal expertise required to obtain it. You can't claim an exemption from the law on the grounds that you don't know what the law is or how to navigate the courts or find a legal basis for avoiding an unjust outcome, and given that such an exemption shouldn't exist in principle, the only way to resolve the contradiction and avoid injustice is to guarantee to everyone a lawyer when they need it. (And forcing laypeople to practise law is a false economy anyway.)
And I don't just mean fully funding the usual legal aid staples like criminal or immigration or family law. I mean funding *everything*. Consider that without enforcement the law is just so much paper. It's all very well and good for Parliament to legislate for a right, or for case law to acknowledge a right, but if you can't ultimately force that right to be acted upon, then it might as well not exist. Whatever you believe the purpose of the law is, that purpose is assuredly not being served by the law being rendered irrelevant, and yet that is exactly the reality of the law for everyone who can't afford lawyers, which is most people.