Returning to Bogdanor’s claim that the reforms since 1997 amount to a “quiet revolution” that has produced, in effect, a new constitution, the evidence gathered across the four periods above can be read two ways.

The case for “revolution”

• Devolution has reshaped territorial governance so thoroughly that abolishing the Scottish Parliament, which secured legitimacy from an 84.6% turnout in the 2014 referendum alone, is now politically unthinkable, even though it remains legally possible.
• The judiciary is markedly more independent and more assertive than before 1997, following the creation of the Supreme Court under the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 and the growth of rights-based judicial review under the Human Rights Act 1998.
• Reform has continued, not stalled: the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Act 2026 and English Devolution and Community Empowerment Act 2026 show governments still actively reshaping the constitution three decades on.

The case against “revolution”

• Parliamentary sovereignty has never been formally limited: Westminster legislated over devolved competences during Brexit without the devolved administrations’ consent, precisely because the Sewel convention embedded in the Scotland Act 2016 is a political convention, not a legal restriction.
• No reform has been legally entrenched against a simple Act of Parliament, and some have already been reversed, most clearly the repeal of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011 after only eleven years.
• The constitution remains uncodified in 2026, spread across statute, common law and convention exactly as it was in 1997, which is difficult to reconcile with the idea of a genuinely “new” constitution.
• Writing in The British Constitution (2007), Anthony King reached a sharply different conclusion from Bogdanor: he judged the post-1997 changes markedly less coherent than earlier reforms, largely invisible to people outside Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and concluded that they had left the constitution in a “mess”, one he thought should be left alone rather than fixed through full codification, since a comprehensive rewrite risked making matters worse.

Reaching a judgement

Bogdanor’s “revolution” and King’s “mess” represent opposite ends of the same evidence, having analysed the same forty years of reform and reached almost opposite conclusions about what it adds up to. Evaluating the two positions means weighing legal continuity against political practice rather than picking a side outright.

Analysis:

In political practice, the constitution has clearly been transformed: it is difficult to imagine a future government abolishing the Scottish Parliament, which drew an 84.6% turnout to its founding referendum alone, ignoring the core protections of the Human Rights Act 1998, or restoring hereditary peers to the House of Lords. Yet in strict legal terms the constitution retains its pre-1997 character, because every one of these changes rests on an ordinary Act of Parliament that a later Parliament can, in principle, repeal, exactly as it did with the Fixed-term Parliaments Act 2011.

Evaluation:

King is therefore right that no single coherent plan sits behind these changes, but wrong to conclude that this makes them insignificant. The reforms of 1997 to 2026 are best judged not as a single revolution but as a lengthening, uncoordinated set of conventions and precedents that behave like a codified constitution while remaining, formally, anything but.

Check your understanding: synoptic review 1. “The UK constitution has undergone a fundamental transformation since 1997.” To what extent do you agree? You should: draw on at least one reform from each of the four periods covered in this document, weigh legal continuity, parliamentary sovereignty, against political and practical change, and reach a substantiated judgement. 2. Using this document, identify the three constitutional reforms since 1997 you consider most significant, and justify your choices. You could: consider criteria such as scale of impact, permanence and public awareness to justify your selection.

^{A fuller comparison with the codified, entrenched US Constitution is developed elsewhere on histpology.co.uk.}

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