Let's Take A Closer Look At The UK's Current Constitutional Crisis

Right now, I think I may be the only person who thinks the UK is in a serious constitutional crisis, or at least the only person who's writing about it. In this post a couple of weeks ago, I talked about the basic problem of the UK's constitutional monarchy, in which the sovereign is theoretically "above politics", but the monarch nevertheless opens parliament with a "king's speech" written for him by the prime minister outlining the government's legislative agenda.

In that post, I noted the palace's extreme discomfort with any implication in the whole king's speech ritual that the king in any way supported the extremely unpopular Starmer government -- but there's only so much poor Charles can do to distance himself from His Majesty's Government. This is precisely the conundrum Thomas Jefferson, a really smart guy, exploited in the text of the Declaration of Independence:

The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

. . . He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

All the way down to "Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us". Although George III had somewhat more executive authority than his 19th and 20th-century successors, he had no authority to create laws, which were passed, as they are now, by pariiament. Jefferson in the Declaration is attributing a great deal of parliamentary policy to the sovereign, which in the end is nevertheless correct -- the 1774 Coercive Acts", or the "Intolerable Acts", intended to punish Massachusetts for the Boston Tea Party, mentioned implicitly in Jefferson's list of grievances, were passed by parliament, not imposed by George III.

Nevertheless, Jefferson attributes every British action to the king, not parliament. The Declaration addresses the sovereign and declares, parliament or no, that he's no longer the sovereign; i e, the UK is no longer sovereign ovewr the incipient US. This was the constitutional crisis of 1776, which has never quite gone away -- the UK itself is trying to deal with an unpopular government that can't be reined in by elections for several more years, but in the meantime, it's His Majesty's Government, no matter how uncomfortable that makes the palace.

But let's move to another part of the current constitutional crisis, exhibited by the Henry Nowak scandal. In yesterday's post, I outlined the stark differences in constitutional protection afforded to people in conrtact with law enforcement in the UK vis-a-vis the US. Any US police officers who behaved as the ones in Southampton did with Henry Nowak would simply have been suspended pending investigation and likely terminated, with serious questions raised about their training and who'd allowed them to stay on the force. There would almost certainly have been resignations higher up.

In the UK, a least so far, there's been only pro forma handwringing from the Hampshire police chief and Keir Starmer, with the chief refusing to resign. The agency charged with investigating the case is leaking that the officers did nothing wrong. I turned to he Chrome AI mode oracle and asked, "What are the principles of US policing in contrast to the UK?" It answered,

The primary principle of US policing is policing by law enforcement, which prioritizes legal authority, crime control, and reactive enforcement. This directly contrasts with the UK principle of policing by consent, which dictates that the police are "citizens in uniform" whose power derives from public approval rather than state coercion.

but doesn't the Henry Nowak case suggest that the UK police aren't acting with public approval? In fact, in the Southampton demomnstration the following day, demonstrators threw bottles and such at a police line, with the result that a dozen or so officers chased down one demonstrator and held him to the ground, while several others repeatedly kicked him (video in yesterday's post). In the US, that demonstrator would have been taken down and hadcuffed, but only with necesssary force, and there would have been no group kicking.

Officers involved in such a vignette in the US would almost certainly be fired and potentially face criminal charges. This sort of thing can start urban race riots; police are trained to avoid it. In the UK, it's apparently business as usual. Why is this?

Discussions of police history in both countries seem to trace police policy as something that began with modern police forces in the early 19th century as a response to growing urbanization -- but the US Bill of Rights, which forms the legal limits on police power, dates from 1787, roughly two generations before modern police departments began. The Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments are the parts of the Bill of Rights that limit police power in the US.I asked the oracle, "Does the UK have equivalent limits to the Bill of Rights on police power?" It answered,

Yes, the UK has equivalent protections, but they are enforced through parliamentary statutes and the Human Rights Act 1998 rather than a single written constitution. Because the UK operates under parliamentary sovereignty, these limits are built into ordinary laws that Parliament can change, unlike the rigidly protected US Bill of Rights.

But clearly, as Nigel Farage pointed out in a link in yeaterday's post, there's "a growing perception that Britain now operates according to a two-tier culture, where some groups receive greater protection than others." In other words, political expediency overrides natural rights, and Keir Starmer's response is to gaslight everyone by claiming that just isn't the case. The fact is that US police policy has been formed by centuries of case law and court opinions based on the Bill of Rights, while the UK has no equivalent tradition of safeguards.

On one hand, the US advantage is that for nearly 250 years, the US has had a written constitution, not just a bien pensant assumption that everyone has good basic intentions. But there's a second problem: Even if the UK suddenly recognized that it actually needs clear limits of authority and a specific enumeration of natural rights in a written constitution -- a lot like, say, the US version -- it would lack the nearly 250 year body of case law that's built up from it.

And in fact, if the UK were to begin to think about a written constitution, it would have to face the problem of how the sovereign can be above politics, but in giving a king's speech at the opening of parliament, he endorses the legislative program of the prime minister, which boils down to the same basic problem Jefferson recognized: if you object to the prime minister's legislative program, you object to the sovereign. Right now, Labour is the king's party, whether the king likes it or not.

The only real solution, as far as I can see, is to cut the Gordian Knot and make the UK the 52nd state. Otherwise, the UK will simply dissolve into a bigger and bigger muddle.