I'm from Ireland, I grew up with what's called a constitution.
We all knew what it was, when we went to university - I studied law.
We were given a book, which was ‘The Constitution’
and it had instructions about how to vote,
who should be the government,
what the courts did, and so on and so forth.
I then started teaching here in England, teaching the very thing
constitutional law, and nobody could find the Constitution.
You'd ask people, "What's the Constitution?"
They'd say, "It's the Queen; it's the prime minister"
There is no constitution in that form,
in the form of a proper set of instructions,
a kind of manual in the United Kingdom.
It's all lost in the midst of time,
it's things called 'agreements' and 'how to behave'.
It's ancient statutes.
People sometimes have heard of, for example, Magna Carta,
which they celebrate all the time here.
It's all cases nobody can find and fewer people can read.
The Constitution is a lost entity in the United Kingdom.
Has that mattered? In the past people thought not.
I think it matters terribly.
I think the Constitution today is broken,
and I think it's pretty easy to fix it.
Let's start with Parliament.
Well, maybe COVID shows Parliament in a good regard,
debating these and those laws
that are necessary to counter this terrible contagion.
Well, up to a point, yes, but consider again.
Is Parliament democratic?
Surely you say it is, but look at the Lords.
It may have been fun. It may have been quaint
to have been governed by
aristocratic betters five or six hundred years ago,
but they're still at it
and they're still able to involve themselves
in this or that important decision
on things like COVID,
as not elected representatives,
but as people lucky enough,
or you might say unlucky enough
to have been born into this or that
hereditary or noble or aristocratic family.
Is the Commons better?
Well, look at the way
in which the government is elected in the Commons.
We have an electoral system that gives complete power
to a party that is able to command, say, 35% of the vote.
It's a quirk of our system, we don't go for majority rule.
To win a thumping majority in the United Kingdom,
you do not have to win the majority of voters in the country.
The result is that, for example, that 35% of voters
have mandated the government to do what it will.
Now, some of those members of the House of Commons
who represent that government - presently, it's the Conservatives,
have extraordinarily strong views about freedom, they say,
and liberty, they say.
And these then mean that it is extremely hard
to ignore those views when it comes to issues related to,
for example, the public emergency that is COVID.
So as in many other areas, this minority
community of persons who put a government
into power with large disproportionate majorities
disproportionately affect
the wisdom of the laws that are enacted.
Then look at the law.
How is the law affected by our Constitution?
Well, if there is a government that has overwhelming power,
on the basis of 35% of the vote,
that government in the British system can do what it wants,
can regulate as it wishes, can be as draconian as it desires.
As long as it squares those few people who matter
because they represent the 35% of the population
as elected representatives representing the governing party.
There is no human rights constraint of the type
that you would get in a properly constituted country
with a written constitution.
Sure, we have a Human Rights Act, but guess what?
The government want to repeal it.
The government don't like it,
and it cannot even strike down acts of Parliament.
Sure, we have the rule of law.
We have courts to try and hold government to account.
But guess what? The government don't like that either.
They've been making suggestions as to how to change things,
which will reduce
the power of the judges to hold government to account.
The British system is a winners take all system so that government,
if it doesn't like decisions, can reverse them.
If it doesn't like judges, it can ignore them.
In fact, just recently they even said as much in the courts,
and it took the Supreme Court,
our top court, to say, "Look, you have to obey us, but only for now."
They have proposals to change human rights law
and judicial review law in order to make themselves even freer.
No document higher than themselves holds them to account.
It's more the editorial in The Daily Mail that matters
than any written framework of government that controls them.
And then at the core of what is wrong with our constitution
is the prime minister, is the cabinet,
and nothing summarises it more
than the fact that while the prime minister
was dominating the country with restrictive rules
that he could impose through Parliament,
he himself was partying in defiance of those rules.
He himself receives criminal notices, penalty notices for parties
he attended unlawfully,
unlawful by reference to the very laws he demanded we follow.
Now, nothing happens.
His advisors, ethical advisors
can say A, B, or C, he says, "No, I don't agree".
As he did with one minister who is accused of bullying.
They resign. He stays.
What's going on here?
There is in the British Constitution something odd.
It was one of the quaint things,
quirky things I mentioned at the start,
which caused me to like the British Constitution
wrongly, as I now know.
It's called conventions - what are they?
They're not laws. They are agreements to behave in a certain way.
They are the sort of chaps who run the place
deciding up with what they will put
and up with what they will not put.
It's about custom and usage.
Now, Mr. Johnson doesn't care about that.
He is absolutely anti custom, anti usage.
He won't resign. He doesn't resign.
Can anything make him?
Vaguely, maybe in the election in two years’ time.
But if he's brazen enough, then he can outride all opposition.
And indeed the Constitution
has no capacity to control brazenness.
It just sits by.
It sits by while he tells the Queen to do things
to get him out of a particular jam.
And it sits by when he says, 'I'm not resigning',
despite having had these penalty notices issued against him.
So there is a central defect.
The assumption that people resign was there in the Constitution
from time immemorial, and it's no longer with us.
The frustrating thing about what I've been describing
is that there is a solution around the corner, one
that is practical, effective and easy to execute.
Here it is.
At the moment 65% of the people who vote
vote against the government
that is formed, because of the idiotic system of voting.
So why don't we do this?
Coming into the next election,
every single party, apart from the Conservatives, combine.
And they say, " We have only one manifesto promise,
and that is to change the electoral system,
to make it proportionate."
"Ooh, that sounds technical." No, it's not.
It's to make sure that in an election the government has
the percentage of votes that reflects a victory.
50% plus.
It's easy to do.
Every country does it
except the United Kingdom and one or two other places.
And so they fight the election only on that,
and they don't fight each other.
So it's the Conservatives saying, we love a system
where we can run the country on 35% of the vote
and everybody else, one candidate,
maybe Labour, maybe Lib Dem,
maybe Plaid Cymru, maybe the Scots Nats say,
"No, you're not getting away with it anymore".
So I'm assuming they win.
And so they immediately change the electoral system.
They don't go in for referend. They don't let The Daily Mail
and The Daily Telegraph and The Times
and all those papers get their teeth into it.
They pass a law, and the law says proportional representation.
If you get 20% of the vote, you get 20% of the seats.
If you get 50% of the vote, you get 50% of the seats.
And then there's another election within six months.
That Parliament only does one thing: fixes the system.
And then Plaid Cymru and the Labour Party and the Lib Dems
and the Scots Nats, they all fight each other in the normal way,
and the Tories are lost
because they've only got 35% of the vote,
and their unnatural capacity to construct a vast majority,
to be able to tell themselves endlessly
they're the most popular people in the country
crumbles into so much dust.
And you’ll have a coalition, probably.
So what?
Every respectable democratic country isn't afraid of coalition.
You can easily have parties agreeing things and executing them,
and you have a country that begins to change almost immediately.
Electoral reform will take us a good way towards where I want to go
It'll help us become fair, inclusive,
broadly speaking social democratic,
but I think there's probably more needed too.
If we can pull off a written constitution
with proper separation of powers,
an end to this kind of weird Lords thing, possibly even -
I don't want to be rude - a president rather than a queen or king.
All to the good.
Anything that kind of normalises Britain,
anything that brings the various countries
in Britain together would be good.
And more than that, and as a way of making it happen,
I think we do need to look at our past, I know it's tricky,
to be able to ask ourselves questions
about the kind of legacy that colonialism has given us.
We need to challenge the assumption that we were an amazing,
exceptional, extraordinary people
and that we remain exceptional, extraordinary people
and just look into
how the country came to have the resources and power that it did,
and then, only then,
will we have a genuine relationship with the present,
which reflects the past and celebrates our triumphant normality.