What, If Anything, Would Be Achieved By The United Kingdom Adopting A Codified Constitution?

Authors Avatar

What, If Anything, Would Be Achieved By The United Kingdom Adopting A Codified Constitution?

Before discussing as to whether or not the United Kingdom would benefit from a codified constitution, it is necessary to define the necessary terms. The HL Constitution Committee defined a constitution as, “the set of laws, rules and practices that create the basic institutions of the state, and its component and related parks, and stipulate the powers of those institutions and the relationship between the different institutions and between those institutions and the individual.” As we can infer from the above, a constitution simply refers to a body of rules, regulating the system of government within a state. In a much narrower concept, a constitution can amount to a written statement of a state’s constitutional rules in a single document, much like the constitutions of India and the U.S.A. The United Kingdom is unlike these two nations mentioned, instead of having a codified constitution, that is to have a single document or series of documents that contain the entire constitutional principles, the U.K possesses an uncodified constitution, meaning there is no and has not been an attempt to create a legal binding document containing all the constitutional rules. Whilst sources comprising the constitution are indeed in written form, i.e. Acts of Parliaments and Statutes, a majority of the sources remain unwritten, such as conventions and the royal prerogative. The U.K can be said to be the only major country in the world to not have a codified constitution, and this has led to a debate as to whether or not the U.K should adopt a codified constitution.

Refuting the need for the UK to adopt a codified constitution would be the fact that there has not been a truly revolutionary momentous event that would signal the need for a codified constitution. The United States declared independence from Britain in 1776 and France adopted new regimes in 1946 and 1958, which all led to their codified constitutions.  Revolution, regime changes or the attainment of independence are the usually basis for a codified constitution, however, the UK has not and did not follow the revolutionary ideas that the above did. Whereas the other revolutionary countries started to make their constitutions, our moments of change preceded revolutionary thinking. Whilst Lord Hailsham in the late 1970’s stated, “a written constitution was needed to protect us against a stealthy communist takeover”, no such threat exists today. Since common rules of constitutions arise from revolutionary periods and owing that the U.K has been absent from this (The ‘Glorious Revolution’, which, whilst instilling Parliamentary Sovereignty, isn’t a sufficient event to signify the need for a codified constitution), the timing isn't correct for the U.K to adopt a codified constitution.

Join now!

To embrace a codified constitution would also impose great inflexibility upon the UK. Society is ever changing and consequently, as a response to these changes, the rules governing society need to evolve, thus, by cementing the rules by which a nation must follow by, would stall evolution. It can be said that constitutions can be codified and still be amended over time, however many codified constitutions are entrenched, making subsequent adjustments extremely hard or near impossible. The U.S.A, whose constitution is so strict that any proposed amendments to the constitution must receive a 2/3 majority supporting the proposal in both ...

This is a preview of the whole essay