The UK constitution is no longer fit for purpose. Discuss.

Authors Avatar

Government & Politics Essay

“The UK constitution is no longer fit for purpose”. Discuss (40 marks)

A constitution is a set of rules that seek to establish the duties, powers and functions of the various institutions of government, regulate relationships between them and define the relationship between the state and individual. In the United Kingdom, the constitution is uncodified, meaning that it is not written down in one place or in fact written down at all. Some areas of our constitution, such as the Human Rights Act are written down but other parts are not written and exist in the form of precedence, i.e. that we’ve had the rules for a long time, haven’t written them down but continue to use them. This uncodified constitution makes the UK constitution open to interpretation unlike a codified constitution such as in the USA where everything is written down in a document and easily defined but not easily flexible.

A key argument against the UK constitution is that due to it being uncodified, it can wield an enormous amount of power as it is open to interpretation. This can be bad as governments can openly interpret the constitution as it is not written down and twist it so that they can get their own way. For example, the British government are able to use extraordinary rendition on suspected terrorists for torture by extraditing them to countries such as Afghanistan and Libya, thereby violating their human rights. They can get away with this however because there is no actual rule against it that is clearly defined in the constitution, torture is illegal in the UK under the Human Rights Act but is not in other countries. This means that the government can interpret the constitution how they like because it is not written down and some parts of it, such as the rule on torture are vaguer than necessary. An alternative would be to write some of the constitution down, for example basic human rights in a document and entrench it so that basic human rights would be clearly defined both nationally and internationally but leaving the constitution flexible so that the government can still use executive power. However, an argument for this part of the constitution would be that the constitution gives the executive (government) power and so the government has the right to wield that power as it has been democratically elected by the people and can do what it deems right in the national interest and national security. This has long been in force within Britain and so the government can define their power as being traditional and keeping in with continuity, a source of the UK constitution.

Join now!

Another argument against the UK constitution’s fitness for purpose is that it was established a long time ago and thereby was written to represent institutions that are now outdated, for example the House of Lords and the monarchy. People on the left wing would argue that these institutions do not represent the people as they are not democratically elected, they would want to see the constitution change to modernise with new institutions such as devolved powers to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. They argue that as the constitution is not fully up to date with modern institutions, it is not ...

This is a preview of the whole essay