David Marquand has a thought-provoking piece at OurKingdom, arguing that Gordon Brown’s Government is the best opportunity that constitutional reformers are likely to have for some time. Ironically, this suggestion might be more relevant in England than in Brown’s native Scotland, where the SNP offers an alternative way forward:
What Labour now needs to do is to revisit what I think of as the
‘democratic republican’ strand in its heritage – the strand that goes
back to Milton’s thunderous prose and Tom Paine’s magnificent audacity:
the strand that emphasises self government by free and active citizens
in a polity they own. Unless and until it does, and explains how this
is enhanced, not diminished, by sharing sovereignty with others in the
EU, its social democracy will be crippled and self-stultifying.
From that perspective, Brown’s talk of Britishness, British values,
and a British Bill of Rights and Duties takes on a new, and potentially
worrying dimension. I admire Brown enormously for having the courage to
call for a national conversation on theuse matters; none of his
predecessors has dared to do anything of the sort. But in the absence
of a clear commitment to replace subjecthood with citizenship – to
locate sovereignty in the citizen body as the French and Americans do
instead of in Westminster and Whitehall – I fear that ‘British values’
will turn out to be restrictive and backward-looking, and that the
proposed British Bill of Rights and Duties will make it harder to give
effect to the rights already contained in the Human Rights Act.
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