WHILE serving as a Member of Parliament for Malton in 1790, the Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke published the book that was to become a staple of conservative constitutional thought: Reflections On The Revolution In France.

Earlier in his political career, Burke had supported the Americans in their revolutionary war against the British, arguing that the colonists were “not only devoted to liberty, but to liberty according to English ideas, and on English principles”. His conservative lurch was spurred by a horrified reaction to France’s violent revolution. The revolution did not stop at restraining royal absolutism. It went on to attack the aristocracy, the church, provincial and local particularities, and all existing laws and institutions. It even changed the calendar itself, replacing a dating system based on the nativity with one based on the revolution. For Burke, this was not the dawning of a new Age of Reason, as imagined by contemporary radicals like Tom Paine, but a disastrous “year zero” of cultural destruction. Nothing sacred would be left to stand.

Burke – helped no doubt by the fact that his arguments were so comfortable to the ruling establishment – won the battle for the public mind. His reflections defined the anti-revolutionary sentiment in British politics and set the bounds of what was, and was not, constitutionally acceptable for the next two centuries. All mainstream British politicians – except perhaps a few Paine-reading eccentrics who were never taken seriously – shared Burke’s scorn of abstract concepts written on parchment and embraced his deference to historical institutions rooted in the Crown, Parliament and the common law.

The Blair-Brown reforms, characterised by half-hearted tinkering at the edges when deeper and more essential changes were sorely needed, were a testament not only to the persistence of Dicey’s concept of the sovereignty of Parliament, but also to the enduring stranglehold of Burke over the Anglo-British constitutional imagination. Back in 1988, Charter 88 had demanded a written constitution. In 1991 the Institute of Public Policy Research had published a draft constitution for the United Kingdom that was, if not perfect, at least excellent. Yet thanks to the prevailing legacy of Edmund Burke it was politically impossible to go that far. Reform of the unwritten constitution – a bit of watered-down devolution here, a light patching of the House of Lords there – could be imagined. Building a new constitution, as the act of a sovereign people determining the system of government best suited to their needs, could not. Burke’s dead hand forbade it.

At the root of Burke’s argument was a fear that revolutions break things. They might break bad things, but they also break good things – and good things are so much harder to build up than to destroy. Revolutions, even if undertaken with the best intentions, could have unintended consequences that make matters worse. Once the constraints of established institutions are overthrown, everything is up for grabs. Revolutionary zealots rule by arbitrary decree, purges and terror, placing themselves above law, order, morality, tradition, custom and precedent, until human civilisation itself is in peril.

Burke is normally deployed against written (codified, supreme and fundamental law) constitutions. The assumption is that written constitutions are necessarily radical, if not revolutionary, documents which seek to sweep away the old and establish something precariously new-fangled. This is simply not the case. Some constitutions are revolutionary. Others are certainly not. In particular, many Commonwealth countries have moderate constitutions based on well established Westminster Model constitutional traditions that owe little or nothing to revolutionary ideals. They are not blueprints for utopia. They are practical and pragmatic documents which attempt to give expression, in a particular historical and socio-cultural context, to well proven institutions and principles. Burke objected to the revolutionary French Constitution of 1791, but he might not have objected, had he lived to see them, to the Westminster Model constitutions of the mid-20th century.

If we share Burke’s fear of revolutionary destruction, how much more should we fear the absence of a proper written constitution? Parliamentary sovereignty allows the incumbent majority to change all constitutional laws, destroy all institutions and uproot all rights. It leaves nothing settled but throws everything into perpetual precariousness. A written constitution, which can be changed only with broader political and public consensus, can therefore be defended, in Burkean terms, on the grounds that some things are just too import, too fundamental and too valuable to be placed at the mercy of a Government backed by an ordinary parliamentary majority. Written constitutions may introduce incremental reforms, but above all they are a means of protecting historically achieved liberties and defending evolved institutions from predation by governing majorities. Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings would not be able to get away with institutional vandalism – attacking the judiciary, Parliament, the devolved institutions and the civil service – if we had a proper constitution to stop them.

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