There's so much that's factually wrong with this comment I don't know where to start. 1. The UK does have a Bill of Rights (It's different in England and Scotland). The English one pre-dates the US Bill of rights by a century[0]. 2. It does have a constitution, but not a written constitution in the American sense[1]. 3. The Queen doesn't nominate Bishops; she rubber stamps nominations by a committee who are approved by the PM. 4. The Queen does not vote in elections.
I stopped reading around: "Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law;" and something about (only) Ireland repealed it in [1].
In [2] it says, quite straight faced, that "The Constitution of the United Kingdom or British constitution comprises the written and unwritten arrangements that establish the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland as a political body. Unlike in most countries, no attempt has been made to codify such arrangements into a single document. Thus, it is known as an uncodified constitution. This enables the constitution to be easily changed as no provisions are formally entrenched.[2] However, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom recognises that there are constitutional principles, including parliamentary sovereignty, the rule of law, democracy and upholding international law".
There is no codified constitution but there are constitutional principles. Because it is not "entrenched" it can be easily changed. How can someone even say this without an Orwellian sneer? If a North Korean said that we would laugh them out of the room.
Edit: North Korea does have a constitution. Written. Just not followed. Britain does not have a written constitution but it is followed (how?), except when it is not as in the wag that it just takes a minister's signature to violate an unwritten (but somehow codified) constitutional principle.
40. "Unlike most countries, the United Kingdom does not have a constitution in
the sense of a single coherent code of fundamental law which prevails over all other sources of law"
43. "This is because Parliamentary sovereignty is a fundamental principle of the UK constitution, as was conclusively established in the statutes referred to in para 41 above. It was famously summarised by Professor Dicey as meaning that
Parliament has “the right to make or unmake any law whatsoever; and further, no
person or body is recognised by the law as having a right to override or set aside the legislation of Parliament” - op cit, p 38"
If you have a majority in Parliament - which the current government does on 43% of the vote - you can do anything. That is the long and the short of it. All the rest you might think is there - bills of attainder, retroactive legislation, any kind of rights whatsoever - can be overwritten and it is merely convention not to do so. Longstanding convention, but convention none the less. Last bill of attainder was 1820, but you could argue that the Shamina Begum case was a similar thing with extra steps.
The UK is currently subject to CJEU and ECHR external courts, but from a constitutional point of view that is "voluntary" and the government could also choose to withdraw from those just as it did from the EU.
“If you think for a minute, is it not the case that every dictator in the world has a bill of rights, every banana republic, every republic has a bill of rights?”
- Antonin Scalia
A constitution without the ecosystem and institutions to carry it out is meaningless paper. Institutions without a constitution, but with a long history of case law can be just.
Governments are systems but people aren't computers and laws aren't source code.
A constitution without separation of powers with the possibility of judging the representatives is worthless.
The fact that doing so is difficult (the most blatant case being Nixon) does not make it worthless, it only helps granting the executive some stability (because it has usually been elected by the people, so it needs some berth to operate).
In that sense, the US constitution is a very good early example.
The independence of the judiciary is essential.
I am not defending the US constitution per se, though.
In the absence of a written constitution whatever is unconstitutional is the ad-hoc interpretation of the Justices (or whatever they are called in the UK). There are arguments in the US about strict constructionists vs. judicial activism in regards to justices and judgements.
How do those debates and decisions happen in the UK? Do they just go with whatever the Judiciary deem to be constitutional zeitgeist of the land?
Don’t they use past decisions as juris-prudence? With centuries of constitutional decisions you start to have a good amount of records to base your judgement on.
But generally speaking I feel that the “interpretation of the constitution” where judges have the responsibility to interpret century old documents is a very US thing, other democracies generally have a more recent constitution, and see it as a living document.
Largely they don't. It's simply not a significant part of UK political discourse, unlike America where many important rights (even interracial marriage!) are the result of court decisions.
It has only picked up in a couple of areas: the conflict of ECHR especially right not to be tortured and right to family life with UK immigration law. And of course around Brexit.
They are the final court of appeal, but they can't strike down primary legislation because Parliament is sovereign. They can strike down secondary legislation and legislation that may be contrary to the Human Rights Act (with the agreement of parliament in many cases). They can make life difficult for the Government, but Parliament can always make new laws. I think the UK system is more democratic because it does not give the judiciary primacy over elected representatives.
> Britain does not have a written constitution but it is followed (how?)
Perhaps this is just a tacit admission that writing the rules on a piece of paper changes nothing. People follow the rules as a kind of collective consensus. Writing them down in one place wouldn’t change that.
"Britain is not a democracy in any modern sense of the word."
Demos kratos - things/doings of the people (or similar) - Old Greek. Nowadays it describes a generally agreed form of government and approach to governing. After that it gets pretty complicated - your democracy may not match mine ...
I'm going to be voting for councillors soon in Somerset, along with everyone else here who can be bothered to turn out. We are not forced to vote. We can freely discuss the vote. We have a reasonable expectation of our vote being counted correctly and can inspect the process if we wish. We can volunteer to count votes too.
That's just local government stuff. Obviously, countrywide elections are taken rather more seriously.
I'm sure your home country of India has similar processes and probably invented them in the first place.
Yours is the most honest answer, but yes, lets agree that Democracy means one person/one vote and everyone's vote is equal. The Brits have a pretty good form of government for its citizen but a one-person/one-vote-and-equal vote it is not. Similarly a country where the Majority's choice does not become President (like the US) does not qualify no matter how loudly they proclaim themselves to be the world's oldest democracy. Those folks also conveniently forget that they just got universal suffrage in 1967.
India did not invent democracy or representative assemblies and I am sure that principle occurred to many a tribe wandering the Savannah or Steppes a long time ago. There are written records of Republican assemblies dating back to ~500 BC in India.
As much as I might want to believe in "one person, one vote" defining a democracy, I don't think it does. It's certainly not in the dictionaries I look it up in (e.g., [1]), and it's not like we don't carve out exclusions even in the most democratic societies (e.g., a 15-year-old would have a hard time finding a place where they could vote). Heck, my understanding is you don't even need to have elections for a democracy, let alone letting every person vote - check out the system in [2]. I don't really like that lottery system, but it sure seems pretty democratic to me.
This isn't to say the US or UK or whatnot is a perfect democracy by any stretch, but that's how I'd describe them: flawed democracies. They're still close enough to democracies to be called democracies, but they're flawed/defective/etc., so that's what I'd call them. (Unless you're going for a no-true-Scotsman thing.)
It does though - "rule of the majority" in the Webster definition implies one person, one vote. If you work out the mathematics starting from n=2, and then by induction it holds. If not one-person/one-vote then for every n, there exists a set of weights, for which one person can usurp the popular vote. In the US, due to the electoral college, some state resident's vote counts for more than others which is why the loser of the popular vote can be the President. Company boards are famously not one-share-one-vote as the latest Muskian opera shows.
The legal age cutoff is a red-herring - every self-proclaimed democracy has a legal voting age i.e. definition of what constitutes the one-person. As long as it is applied uniformly across genders, races and the rest then it is does not take away from the one-person/one-vote criteria. I would argue that if they can enlist you to fight (and die) for them, then you should be able to vote. However different societies might have different criteria for what constitutes the person in one-person-one-vote.
BTW, thank you for your comment, after all the sneering and name-calling it is nice to engage is reasoned discourse.
Note majority rule isn't in the definition either, it's just strongly correlated. As the simplest example, a democracy that required 55% of the votes wouldn't stop being a democracy. For more different examples, see the lottery system I linked to, or imagine variations thereof (e.g., half the population votes one year, half the next year, etc.).
Also, I don't think the age-limit is a red herring in this case to be honest, since it's another manifestation of "who is a person". Claiming a 17yo is not a person in the US but is a person in Argentina undermines the notion that there's a universal definition of democracy (even one that has an age cutoff)... which is the premise of this entire argument! Otherwise we're acknowledging different societies can differ on whose votes they care about, and still be democracies. (Which I think is fine: we merely need a fair & just definition of democracy. It just isn't as simple as "one person, one vote", is all.)
> "As the simplest example, a democracy that required 55% of the votes wouldn't stop being a democracy."
Good point. Considering that 55% is > 50%, would we not say that anything that requires more than 50%, is a supra-majority system? In a multi-party system, they sometimes require some thresholds which requires runoffs but I would consider them supra-majority or supra-variations on the majority rule.
> Claiming a 17yo is not a person in the US but is a person in Argentina undermines the notion that there's a universal definition of democracy... which is the premise of this entire argument!
Societies the world over different notions of what constitutes legal age for driving, marriage, enlisting and in general to be considered of age. Voting is just one more manifestation of that inconsistency.
Your other point about lottery systems does seem interesting but could we not say that term-limits are a (poor) version of a lottery system? Term limits have pros-and-cons and those would transfer to the lottery system, namely lack of institutional knowledge to run a govt in which case the bureaucracy (also called the deep state in fringe literature) would dominate.
I just wrote a long reply to your comment, but I realized it ultimately was just a ramble, so I'll scrap it.
To answer your questions briefly:
- Sure, I guess we can call it that.
- Term limits seem orthogonal to the lottery system though? You can have either with or without the other. Not sure I can see them as being versions of each other.
Democracy doesn't mean one person one vote per se - it means governance by "the people" instead of the tyrant. Ironically a tyrant might be deliberately installed in times of peril by the people and then removed from office later on. Politics were quite robust in those days. Politics - from politike I think (never studied Greek, only Latin) - people of the city, also "police" is derived from politike or perhaps polis, which is nearly how Police is pronounced with a Scottish accent - especially around Glasgow.
Let's face it when the Greeks came up with a functional democracy, slavery was routine and obviously women and servants and other undesirables were ineligible to vote. Times have changed somewhat since then but there is still much work to do to ensure full equality for all. One day we may all be able to cry "Liberty, equality, fraternity" and not frown at fraternity meaning brotherhood and hence is rather sexist.
Anyway, what we have here in the UK is a voting system which is called "first past the post". It does involve one person = one vote but it is designed to avoid close results meaning a hung parliament. I don't actually know anyone who is a fan of this system but then again voting systems are quite a niche worry at the moment. The US system for presidential elections "colleges" is even weirder than ours for parliament/PM.
Quite obviously the UK cannot be the oldest example of a democracy because the word itself is way older than the UK and the old Greeks clearly invented the concept and lived by it! The current boast I think is oldest parliament "Mother of Parliaments" but I think Iceland may have prior art on that with the Alþingi - "allthingi". That letter that looks like a p is a thorne and was also used in English until we unceremoniously ditched it a few years back. Thorne also has a form that looks like y so "Ye olde shoppe" which is literally pronounced as "the old shop" but most hereabouts will insist on as something like "ye oldee shopee". Bloody kids!
No, democracy is NOT one person one vote. That is a specific kind of democracy, which may or may not be acceptable for whatever reasons. Democracy means
“the people” as a group decide the outcome. But how it is done may defer a lot.
> There is no constitution, bill of rights, and while there are elections in the mainland
The UK is a constitutional monarchy and does have a bill of rights.
> nominates huge numbers of Bishops to the British Parliament
It's a bit more nuanced than that. The Queen doesn't nominate anyone to Parliament, at least not in the way you're implying. Just like she has to sign a bill into law before it has any effect, she does so as a ceremonial function rather than with a critical eye which is exactly the same as with nominations like this.
To take any action but that which is recommended to her by relevant (elected) parties would result in a pretty big crisis that would ultimately see her ceremonial roles stripped.
> Many hereditary "Peers" hold title and they cannot prevent Bills from Passing but they can hold them up and amend them.
The house of lords is a pretty good check on the house of commons. Implying it's purely a thing that functions to "hold up" bills is rather incorrect.
> Britain even them claimed the mantle of "World Oldest Democracy"/ "Cradle of Democracy".
I've never seen such a thing, have you got a source?
> To take any action but that which is recommended to her by relevant (elected) parties would result in a pretty big crisis that would ultimately see her ceremonial roles stripped.
This actually did occur in Belgium: in 1990 then-king Baudouin refused to sign abortion laws in to effect, citing his Catholic faith. The Belgian constitution allows for parliament to sign laws in to effect if the king is incapacitated so they declared him incapacitated for a day, signed the laws in to effect, after which everything continued as before (the exact legal manoeuvring is a little bit more complex, but this is essentially what it amounted to).
I would imagine something similar would happen in the UK; for reasons that elude me personally the monarchy is quite popular, so I wouldn't necessarily expect it to be stripped of all ceremonial roles.
Reading the applicable Regency Act of 1937 it has similar language that could be used to the same effort, but of course hard to be sure without it actually happening :-)
You say all this about the UK's constitution but it is not codified anywhere. Is it based on precedence, custom or generally accepted principle that it will happen this way if things do come to a crisis.
It all seems to be asserted resting on....on an uncodified constitution.
I'm a massive fan of an uncodified constitution. It allows parliament to have a great deal of flexibility and modernisation.
New laws can be iteratively created rather than relying on extremely old documents and lawyers/historians who attempt to decipher what was intended and how that relates to modern times.
If the US constitution was converted into a set of laws and then deleted, what do you think would happen? Attempts to be made to change the laws, some would pass, some would fail, but the passing of those laws would still be democratic if those making them were democratically elected.
I'm trying to understand why the toys flew out the pram when I said
"democracy". Did it offend, as if to say "Hey we live in a democracy
and by implication all other countries are shite" ? I didn't mean
that. It's a very loaded word, so sorry if it "triggers". Notice I
didn't say functional democracy. I guess along with it goes a whole
slew of hidden values, like how we expect public figures to behave,
and how we expect institutions to work.
This is essentially true. The UK was nothing but a dictatorship until it shed off all of its colonies.
As it is right now, the UK has a mix of parliamentary supremacy and unequal representation which means that with ~40% of the vote, given you are courting the right people and are a more entrenched party, you can do essentially whatever you want as a majority in parliament is basically supreme.
As it is right now, the UK does not fit any definition of democracy.
