Category: Constitutional reform
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Mike Gordon: A New Britain, A New Constitution? Labour’s Proposals for Constitutional Entrenchment
The Labour Party’s Commission on the UK’s Future has published a report making some bold proposals for constitutional reform. The most striking proposal in A New Britain: Renewing our Democracy and Rebuilding our Economy is to change the UK’s constitutional model in a way which introduces a form of entrenchment into our legal and political system. In essence, this…
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Daniella Lock: Three Ways the Bill of Rights Bill Undermines UK Sovereignty
The Bill of Rights Bill is framed by the Government as necessary to ensure ‘meaningful democratic oversight’ of human rights protection in the UK, with Conservative MPs keen to present the Bill as a means to restore sovereignty in the face of interfering judges – both at the level of the European Court of Human…
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Jacob Eisler: The Elections Act in Uncertain Times: Democracy, Partisanship, and the Uncodified Constitution
The Elections Act 2022 – finally law after a long and contentious development in the Commons and the Lords – implements a number of controversial measures. The ID provision requires that persons present a photographic identification at the polls. This has raised concerns of suppressing the vote of economically and socially vulnerable groups who may…
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Stephen Tierney and Alison Young: Constitution Committee report on the Future Governance of the UK
Following a year-long inquiry into the future governance of the United Kingdom, the House of Lords Constitution Committee today publishes its report, Respect and Co-operation: Building a Stronger Union for the 21st century. The document comprises 10 chapters, beginning with reflections upon the state of the Union. It then turns to parliamentary sovereignty, relations between…
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Richard Clayton QC: The Government’s New Proposals for the Human Rights Act Part 3: An Assessment
This post completes my analysis of the Government’s Proposals for reform of the Human Rights Act 1998, following Part 1 (outlining the proposals) and Part 2 (analysing the interaction with the common law, the UK Supreme Court, and the intention to sharpen the focus on fundamental rights). This post considers three final themes of the…
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Mike Gordon: A Statutory Basis for the Ministerial Code – the Challenges
With the UK in the midst of its latest political corruption crisis, the question of the (in)adequacy of the current infrastructure concerning standards in public life is once more in the spotlight. Immediately prior to the parliamentary farce over the Owen Paterson lobbying affair, the Committee on Standards in Public Life published a significant report,…
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Jason Varuhas: Remedies Reform Part 2: Discretionary Factors
This is the second in a series of two posts on the remedial reforms proposed in the Judicial Review and Courts Bill (2021), which provide for courts in judicial review proceedings to grant suspended and prospective-only quashing orders. The first post considered the general case for reform, arguing reform is justified so as to reassert…
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Lee Marsons: Constitutional change in an era of incrementalism: Launching Public law Project’s UK constitutional reform tracker
We are living in constitutionally eventful times. From the prorogation of Parliament, Brexit and the Northern Ireland Protocol, the Independent Review of Administrative Law, the Independent Human Rights Act Review, the Nationality and Borders Bill, the Judicial Review and Courts Bill, or multiple stories surrounding the ministerial code, this is a time of ongoing constitutional importance, tension, and change. It is difficult to keep up,…
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Joe Tomlinson: Government as Skunk Works
The legislative programme of this Government has—unsurprisingly, given its widely stated reformist ambitions—attracted close attention from those interested in constitutional matters. Several bills have been introduced into this Parliament that have (rightly) been the subject of extensive commentary and interest in this respect, including the Judicial Review and Courts Bill, the Dissolution and Calling of…
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Jonathan Morgan: IRAL’s Missing Remedy: Compensation for Unlawfulness
The current blog post considers the failure of the current judicial review reform process, from IRAL onwards, to give proper consideration to compensation for unlawful government acts. This has been less discussed than the discretion over the temporal effect of quashing orders (which I considered here). It may be that the Realpolitik of this omission…