How quickly it begins

One of the things I try to get students to understand is that change happens quickly and this morning illustrates that beautifully. A relatively minor, though systematic, scandal over MPS expenses has unleashed calls for wholesale reform of the UK political system. Just what that might entail is not clear. The Mail was calling on the Queen to fire the Speaker of the Commons late last week, revealing a breathtaking ignorance of English constitutional history (the last king who tried to do that ended up executed in front of Whitehall).  The Guardian, predictably, has other ideas on reform, too many and mostly contradictory, but it is astonishing to see calls for democratisation of the political system supported by the, accurate, argument that the UK needs to reorganise around a doctrine of popular sovereignty rather than parliamentary sovereignty. Last February that was too strong for the group at The Convention on Modern Liberty who were a self-selecting group of constitutional reformers. Today that is presented as common sense in the national newspaper most associated with the New Labour project (and is there anything as dead as that?).

A huge problem is that the US constitution has become the point of reference for calls for reform. That would be a terrible mistake as the last thing that a system with over-concentration of sovereignty needs is an imperial presidency. At least the regalian powers exercised by the Prime Minister operate through cabinet government (weak as that has been in recent years). There is no off the shelf solution and no way to short-circuit the reform process. Sooner or later we are going to have a constitutional convention. Historians of revolutions may suddenly find ourselves  equipped with pertinent skills!