Democracy under threat?

‘Our system of governance has been undergoing a rare stress test which has sorely tried its democratic underpinnings,’ Professor Sir Jeffrey Jowell KCMG, KC said in this year’s Rothschild Foster Human Rights Trust lecture on 2 November. He saw no prospect of agreement on a written constitution but proposed statutory reforms.

Democratic die-back

There were many concerning examples of what he called ‘constitutional slippage, of democratic die-back’:

• The Ministerial Code had required that ministers comply with the law ‘including international law and treaty obligations’. In 2015, the reference to international law was excised—‘a telling signal, and consistent with recent actions by the government which reveal little regard for the rule of law in the international order’.
• The Brexit treaty creating a customs border between the UK and Northern Ireland was a subject of bitter contention. When negotiations with the EU to relax the border control stalled, the government had introduced a Bill unilaterally to breach their