Is Andy Burnham About to Create a British Constitution?
https://bylinetimes.com/2026/08/19/is-andy-burnham-about-to-create-a-british-constitution/Open linkView original on leminal.spaceSyndicated from the fediverse. Read and engage on the original instance.
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7 replies
If he does, I hope he does a better job than the "British Values" nonsense that Boris Johnson and co inflicted upon us.
I worked as a lecturer when that came out. Every course now needed to explain how it teaches "British Values". I taught programming.
"In this topic, to demonstrate the value of Tolerance, I discuss how some people prefer to indent with tabs and some with spaces. I explain that, despite often being a point of contention amongst programmers, both are equally valid approaches."
And who read those things? I'm sure absolutely no-one.
Having to treat tab indentation and space indentation as equally valid is diabolical
If they do make a single written Constitution, it's going to be a fucking cluster fuck.
Some cunt will try put in some bullshit preventing independence or taking away rights from certain people or some authoritarian horse shit. It doesn't matter who is in power. And every time there's any movement for change or anything I'll just waive the Constitution people's faces like it's some fucking holy book.
It sort of reminds me of the perennial calls for a pledge of allegiance for Britain.
Yeah it's just reflexive 'do-somethingism' which falls apart on contact with our actual constitution I think. I'm not saying the Westminster system is perfect, far from it, but there's legitimate costs to breaking the logic of the system as it exists too badly. It's not even clear how you would create a written constitution with the same weight most countries have one for example, by definition it'd be an Act of Parliament which any future Parliament can undo.
The Brexit referendum is another great example of why it's a bad idea, it had the same constitution-breaking property of creating an effectively binding mandate external to the House of Commons which is something that straight up isn't meant to exist in the Westminster system - it created massive amounts of destabilisation in its own right that the system was never really designed to cope with, without even getting into the consequences of Brexit itself. Compare that to the Scottish independence referendum which was comparatively less destabilising politically, being conducted by the Scottish government under well-defined delegated authority from Westminster it was not constitution-breaking in the same way.
There is a British Constitution. It’s just not all in one document.
The British Constitution is as-built documentation, not all that diligently maintained.
Already got one it's called the law