An English Parliament: A Proposal for Fairness & Transparency in a New Constitutional Settlement for Britain

An English Parliament. A Proposal for Fairness & Transparency in a New Constitutional Settlement for Britain

By Jocelyn Ormond

Published by the Bow Group 1999

Some Extracts selected by Don Beadle

3.4.6. Resolving conflicts between parliaments

Federalism would destroy the overall sovereignty of the British Parliament because each legislature in a federal system has to be legally autonomous, sovereign and independent from the others. The practical results of this would be:

• To politicise the judiciary since they would have to determine the competence of each legislature. The result will already, to a lesser extent, be the result of Scottish devolution. Under a federal solution, however, Parliament would have abrogated its right which would be available to it in theory under the existing structure to overturn a judgement which undermined its powers. The judges would have a whip-hand
• To codify the constitution since the judiciary would need to have a clear set of rules and principles to follow in making decisions about where each legislature’s sovereignty should begin and end. In a particular set of circumstances. At present the constitution consists of a variety of laws, conventions and customs, which are widely recognised to form the basis of our constitution. Our constitution has evolved over the course of our history as a result of particular circumstances prevailing at different periods. Any attempt to write down the British constitution in a single document would, however, almost certainly precipitate an attempt by the Left secure radical rewriting of the constitution. Such radical rewriting is, for instance, the core agenda of the political pressure group Charter 88. The question of how the new constitution should be worded would become the subject of fierce political debate, as political parties and other parties argued about which rights and obligations of the ordinary citizen were self-evident. Codification of the constitution would also, as the distinguished nineteenth century jurist Dicey argued, produce a system lacking in the flexibility, which he so admired in the British constitution.

4.1. Summary

As has been illustrated in the last chapter, proposals for structural reform of Parliament and for devolution to England’s regions fail to meet some or all of our basic criteria, particularly the need to treat the English fairly. Federalism solves the West Lothian question and is fair to the English, but would mean the end to parliamentary sovereignty and politicise the judiciary. What is needed is a solution which retains the basic idea of devolving legislative powers to English and Welsh assemblies but which works with the grain of the existing constitution by retaining parliamentary sovereignty. The answer is to use Scottish devolution as a template to devolution for England and Wales; Britain’s parliament should legislate to create full-scale English and Welsh parliaments.

4.5 The Implications for Overseas Territories.

We have looked at how a comprehensive devolution settlement as proposed in this paper could safeguard the interest of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. It is worth remembering at this point that the UK has important bonds with the Isle of Man, the Channel Islands and those former colonies, which are now dependent territories. Many of the same arguments which apply to the different parts of mainland Britain should apply equally to these islands: the fact that they are geographically removed does not reduce the moral and political force of the principles which this paper has already laid out.