Constitutional reform under Labour since 2024
Keir Starmer’s government, elected in July 2024, resumed a reforming momentum, framing much of it as finishing “unfinished business” left over from 1997, most visibly in the House of Lords, alongside a renewed push on English devolution and the electoral franchise. Year Reform What it did Outcome 2026 House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Act 2026 […]
Reform since 2015: the union under strain and further devolution
This period opens with the aftermath of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, is dominated in the middle years by the constitutional shock of Brexit, and closes with a series of more technical changes to elections, the judiciary and the executive. Year Reform What it did Outcome 2014 Scottish independence referendum Held under the Edinburgh Agreement, […]
Constitutional reform under the Coalition, 2010-2015
The 2010 coalition agreement between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats produced a further burst of reform, driven largely by the Liberal Democrats, who had long campaigned for electoral and Lords reform, in exchange for supporting a Conservative-led government. Year Reform What it did Outcome 2011 Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 Removed the Prime Minister’s power to […]
Constitutional reform under Labour, 1997-2010
Tony Blair’s government was elected in 1997 having promised, in a 1994 conference speech, “the biggest programme of change to democracy ever proposed”. Over the next thirteen years, Labour reformed almost every part of the constitution: the judiciary, the House of Lords, the electoral systems used outside Westminster, and the territorial governance of Scotland, Wales […]
UK Constitution: Reform and Change since 1997.
Introduction In 2005, the constitutional historian Vernon Bogdanor described the sequence of changes made to the UK constitution (the body of rules, some legal and some conventional, that governs how the country is run) since 1997 as a “quiet revolution”, arguing in a fuller study four years later that these reforms, taken together with the […]
Conclusion: does the constitution ‘not… exist’?
Return to Tocqueville’s claim that because Parliament can modify the constitution at will, it “does not in reality exist.” Almost two centuries on, the most recent entry in the historical table, the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Act 2026, tests that claim rather precisely. Parliament altered the composition of one of its own chambers through […]
The five sources of the UK Constitution
Key terms Statute law: law made directly by Act of Parliament, passed by the House of Commons and House of Lords and given royal assent. Common law: law developed by judges through decisions in individual court cases, based on precedent (the principle that earlier decisions of higher courts bind later, similar cases). Convention: an unwritten […]
The nature of the UK constitution
Key terms Twin pillars: the term used to describe parliamentary sovereignty and the rule of law together, the two principles regarded as the joint foundation of the UK constitution. Parliamentary sovereignty: the principle, associated with the constitutional theorist A.V. Dicey, that Parliament can make or unmake any law it wishes, that no Parliament can bind […]
The development of the UK Constitution
Unlike the United States, which adopted a single written (codified) constitution in 1787, the UK constitution has never been set down in one place at one time. Instead, it has grown through a sequence of separate documents, each responding to a particular political need or crisis, spread across more than 800 years. The table below […]
What is a CONSTITUTION?
Every state has some form of constitution, in the loose sense of rules governing how it is run. “In England the Parliament has an acknowledged right to modify the constitution; as, therefore, the constitution may undergo perpetual changes, it does not in reality exist.” Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835) Alexis de Tocqueville was […]