A Final Assessment of Where the UK’s Constitutional Arrangements Stand, What Has Changed, What Hasn’t, and Why Nobody Is Going to Fix the House of Lords This Parliamentary Session Either
Taking Stock: The Constitution After Cameron, Brexit, Johnson, Truss, and Whatever Comes Next
The student who has persevered through the preceding chapters of this volume — through uncodified constitutions and unelected peers, through royal prerogatives and prorogation crises, through Barnett Formulae and banana-shaped regulatory divergence, through Partygate and the VIP lane and Trussonomics and the Rwanda scheme — may reasonably ask: how is the British constitution holding up? The honest answer is: better than it might have, worse than it should be, and with a resilience that is simultaneously admirable and slightly baffling given what it has been put through.
The decade between 2014 and 2024 subjected the British constitutional settlement to a sequence of stresses for which no preparation had been made and no playbook existed: a Scottish independence referendum that came closer than anyone had publicly anticipated; a Brexit referendum that divided the country and paralysed Parliament for three years; a Prime Minister who prorogued Parliament and was found to have acted unlawfully; a pandemic that concentrated executive power to an unprecedented peacetime degree; a Budget that crashed the bond market in a fortnight; and a general election that produced the largest parliamentary majority in decades on the lowest governing party vote share in modern history. The constitution survived all of this. Several conventions did not.
What the Last Decade Has Demonstrated About the British Constitution
The Miller cases demonstrated that the courts will constrain executive prerogative when it directly frustrates parliamentary sovereignty — and that this constraint, when applied, works. The Partygate episode demonstrated that the convention of ministerial responsibility operates on the basis of shame rather than enforcement — and that shame has a variable threshold depending on the incumbent. The Truss mini-budget demonstrated that market confidence is a real constitutional constraint on fiscal policy, more binding in practice than parliamentary authority. The devolution settlements demonstrated that asymmetric constitutional arrangements create tensions that accumulate rather than resolve when the overarching framework — EU membership — that contained them is removed.
The overall picture is of a constitution that functions through a combination of genuine institutional strength and deliberate ambiguity — strong where the institutions are independent and well-resourced (the courts, the civil service, the Bank of England), fragile where the accountability mechanisms depend on the self-restraint of the people being held accountable (ministerial conduct, patronage, the revolving door).
The Starmer Government: Change, Continuity, and the Weight of Inheritance
The Labour government elected in July 2024 inherited an economy growing slowly, public services under sustained pressure, a housing crisis deepening, regional inequality persistent, and a parliamentary majority of 174 that gave it the legislative capacity to pursue an ambitious programme if it chose to. It also inherited fourteen years of fiscal decisions, institutional erosion, and public expectation management that had produced a gap between what citizens expect from the state and what the state currently delivers.
The government’s self-described “missions” — clean energy, NHS reform, economic growth, safer streets, opportunity — are serious policy objectives and deliberately long-term in framing. Whether a government that won on 34% of the vote, in a parliament elected under FPTP, with a mandate to fix things that its own party had described as crises for fourteen years without always specifying exactly how, can deliver sustained transformation across a five-year term is the central question of the current political moment.
The early record — Lords reform advancing, devolution deals proceeding, planning reform controversial but progressing, fiscal inheritance tighter than the pre-election accounts suggested — is the record of a government that is governing rather than campaigning, which is both an achievement and a reminder that governing is considerably harder than either.
The Opposition: Reconstruction, Repositioning, and the Long Road Back
The Conservative Party, under Kemi Badenoch, is attempting to define a post-Johnson, post-Truss conservatism that can compete with both Labour and Reform UK for a fractured right-of-centre electorate. The task is substantial: the party needs to rebuild economic credibility destroyed in September 2022, explain fourteen years of governance without either repudiating its own record or defending everything in it, and offer a policy prospectus that distinguishes it from Reform UK on the right without conceding the centre to Labour.
These are not impossible tasks. The Conservative Party has recovered from catastrophic defeats before — 1906, 1945, 1997 — and has consistently demonstrated a Darwinian survival instinct that is among its most reliable institutional characteristics. Whether the current opposition period produces genuine ideological renewal or tactical repositioning dressed as renewal is the question that the next election will eventually answer.
What British Democracy Needs That British Politics Has Difficulty Providing
The reform agenda for British democracy is not a mystery. The academics, the think tanks, the select committees, the international comparisons, and in many cases the politicians in reflective moments have identified it clearly: electoral reform that better represents the distribution of opinion in the electorate; Lords reform that produces a second chamber with democratic legitimacy; constitutional codification that makes the rules explicit and enforceable; devolution that addresses English regional inequality with the same seriousness as Scottish and Welsh national identity; accountability mechanisms for ministerial conduct that operate independently of ministerial goodwill; and political funding reform that reduces the influence of wealthy donors on democratic outcomes.
Each of these reforms is well-understood. Each faces real political obstacles. Some — electoral reform, constitutional codification — would require the party in power to support changes that reduce its structural advantage. Others — Lords reform, lobbying reform — would require politicians to constrain the patronage and access that incumbency provides. The pattern of British constitutional reform has always been that change comes when the political costs of the status quo exceed the political costs of change — and that calculating that threshold in advance is considerably harder than it appears in retrospect.
The British constitution is, as it has always been, a work in progress. The progress is real. It is also incomplete, inconsistent, and occasionally moving in the wrong direction. This is not an assessment unique to the current moment. It is, with varying specific details, the assessment that would have been accurate at almost any point in the last three hundred years. The continuity is itself, perhaps, the most British constitutional observation of all.
Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!
The Starmer Labour government took office in July 2024 with a 174-seat majority on 34% of the vote. Kemi Badenoch was elected Conservative leader in November 2024 following the party’s worst general election result since 1906. The government’s programme includes Lords reform to remove hereditary peers, planning reform, clean energy investment, and NHS rebuilding. The UK’s democratic health is rated as a “full democracy” in international indices while facing persistent challenges of declining trust, electoral system distortion, and incomplete constitutional reform. The reform agenda — electoral reform, Lords reform, constitutional codification, accountability mechanisms — is well-documented but faces structural political obstacles. The British constitution’s characteristic mode of change — incremental, reactive, convention-based — continues.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
In British comedy, the prat is the character who makes us laugh because they remind us of ourselves at our most foolish and most human.
Satire makes laugh uncomfortable. Sweet spot.