Constitutional Breakdown

TALKING POLITICS

Catherine Carr

News, News & Politics

4.7 • 2.5K Ratings

🗓️ 6 June 2019

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We ask whether the UK constitution is cracking up - and if so, where's the breakpoint going to come? Is Brexit at the heart of the current crisis or does it go deeper than that? What's the role of the Supreme Court? And the Queen? Could the Bank of England play a part? And where does Scotland fit in? We try to piece it all together with Helen Thompson, Chris Bickerton and Kenneth Armstrong.

Talking Points:

The British constitution is under big strain right now, and not just because of Brexit.

The British constitution is a political one, and If there is a crisis it is a crisis of politics. Fundamentally, this is about representation.
What happens if the next Conservative leader doesn’t command the confidence of Parliament?

Right now, the constitution is facing multiple sources of strain including the Fixed Term Parliament Act, Brexit, and problems within the Union.

To survive, the constitution has to adapt to all of these things simultaneously.
Would things be better if the constitution were codified?

If elections have been played down as a political tie breaker because of the Fixed Term Parliament Act, is there space for something else?

The rise of the Brexit party could create a real complication.
At a certain point, it becomes difficult to disentangle the party dynamics and constitutional issues.

Where are the pressure points in Scottish politics now?

The most immediate one was the other week when the Scottish government published the referendum bill. It doesn’t provide for a second referendum.
This is a way of trying to corral politics toward a second referendum without pushing a button immediately.
Scotland is itself a vexed constitutional question.

Mentioned in this Episode:

Further Learning:

And as ever, recommended reading curated by our friends at the LRB can be found here: lrb.co.uk/talking

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello my name is David Ronserman and this is Talking Politics. The British
0:12.5	Constitution is under big strain at the moment, not just because of Brexit. We're
0:18.0	going to try and work out where it might break.
0:25.1	Talking Politics is brought to you in partnership with the London Review of
0:28.8	Books. As politics speeds up, slow down with a subscription to the LRB where
0:35.5	Brexit and Trump are only part of a picture that includes, well, everything else.
0:40.4	Read relevant pieces and subscribe at a special rate at lrb.co.uk
0:47.4	forward slash talking.
0:52.7	I have Helen Thompson with me Chris Bickerton Kenneth Armstrong, so
0:57.0	political economist, political scientist and allure. The Economist magazine had
1:02.5	a cover feature this week, so we're mixing metaphors here. They had the
1:06.4	Constitution as a time bomb that's about to go off. So where it will blow, where
1:11.8	it will break, but there is a sense and I don't think this is just about Brexit
1:15.8	and we will come on to Scotland and the UK more generally a bit later. That the
1:22.2	way we do politics in this country as a constitutional order is under a
1:25.2	kind of strain that it hasn't been under in our lifetimes and maybe for
1:29.3	longer than that. Kenneth, we start, doesn't have to be a legal perspective, it
1:33.2	can be any kind of perspective you like, but from your point of view, if you just
1:36.6	look at where we are now, where is the pressure point for you? Where is this
1:41.7	constitutional arrangement under the most strain? We tend to think about our
1:46.1	constitution as being a political constitution rather than the kind of written
1:49.8	legal constitutions of other European states and if that's true, then if there
	...

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