Tag: Brexit
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Kenneth A. Armstrong: From the Shadow of Hierarchy to the Shadow of Competition – Common Frameworks and the Disciplining of Divergence
This time last year, the controversial United Kingdom Internal Market Bill was ping-ponging between the Commons and Lords. A key point of contention concerned the relationship between the ‘market access’ principles now enshrined in the Act – the mutual recognition and non-discrimination principles – and future exercises of devolved rule-making. Should post-Brexit internal regulatory divergence…
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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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Vernon Bogdanor: Reply to McHarg and Young
Aileen McHarg and Alison Young believe that the new British constitution, which I wrote about in my book of that name published in 2009 is less securely based than I suggested. The pillars of that new constitution were, I argued, the Human Rights Act, the devolution settlement, the referendum, and the new arrangements for the…
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Aileen McHarg and Alison L. Young: The Resilience of the (Old) British Constitution
In 2009, Vernon Bogdanor wrote about The New British Constitution. His thesis was that a decade of New Labour reforms had produced a shift in the nature of the constitution, from one based on parliamentary sovereignty, to one based on the ‘sovereignty of the constitution’. Since 2009, further constitutional reforms have been implemented by governments…
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Stephanie Reynolds: Playing Politics So the UKSC Doesn’t Have To: The CJEU Ruling in Case C-709/20 CG v Department for Communities in Northern Ireland
In its recent CG judgment, the EU’s Court of Justice held that it was lawful for Universal Credit Regulations to stipulate that EU citizens do not, by virtue of pre-settled status, have a ‘right to reside’ in the UK for the purposes of accessing Universal Credit. Since the right to reside test is an eligibility…
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Nicholas Kilford: The Supremacy of Retained EU Law: ‘We’re Lost, But We’re Making Good Time!’
The UK’s departure from the EU was marked, at least in legal terms, by a curious combination of change and continuity. One key issue ripe for change was the principle of the supremacy of EU law. Vote Leave argued before the referendum that this principle ‘stops the British public from being able to vote out…
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Colin Murray: Vichy France and Vassalage: Hyperbole versus the Northern Ireland Protocol
Brexit has posed a profound challenge for Northern Ireland’s fragile constitutional arrangements. Those very arrangements provided for a delicate balance of Northern Ireland’s constitutional position. Northern Ireland is part of the UK only with the continuing consent of the people of Northern Ireland, and the 1998 Agreement provided for a range of measures which connected Ireland and…
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Tim Sayer: Preserving Judicial Oversight: An Appeal to Self-Interest
Boris Johnson’s government takes the view that ours is a time of judicial overreach, necessitating redress in terms of the balance of judicial and executive power. This seems to have been driven by a number of high-profile cases, certain vocal thinktanks which appear to have the ear of government, and a wider constitutional prospectus of…
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Nicholas Kilford: The UK Internal Market Act’s Interaction with Senedd Competences: The Welsh Government’s Challenge
On its passage through Parliament, the United Kingdom Internal Market Act 2020 (UKIMA) attracted a great deal of criticism, the majority of which was directed towards the – since withdrawn – provisions which purported to break international law (albeit apparently only in a limited and specific way). Another, perhaps initially overshadowed, criticism, now coming to…
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Rivka Weill: We the British People Rule: From 1832 to the Present
To anyone who accepts Britain’s parliamentary sovereignty, Brexit should not make sense. How could a nation committed to parliamentary rule find itself bound by a consultative referendum’s result? And after the majority of Parliament had repeatedly opposed Brexit! In “From Earl Grey to Boris Johnson: Brexit and the Anglo-American Constitutional Model,” I reveal that…