cam : To add to the Bishop issue, apparently they sit in the House of Lords too.

adam : It's tied into 18th / 19th century Anglo-Irish politics. It was a major source of controversy at the time. The Church of England is still an established church, supported by the taxpayer. That's where the Anglican bishop crossover comes from. Everyone seems a bit embarassed about it now, but at the same time feeling that without the government subsidy all those nice looking churches would stop looking so nice.

cam : I guess it isn't killing them, but wouldn't a Heritage Act suffice for public funding for historical buildings of national significance (including churches) be better and then boot the bishops out of parliament, and dump their appointments on Canterbury.

Wonder why they haven't done it. Must not be publicly palatable, or more likely, not worth wasting political capital over.

adam : There is a detailed system of heritage listing but there are also a lot of churches. It's not just the buildings, people do have a vague sense of support for the CoE and the village institutionalism / tradition it represents.

adam : Amusing note by Simon Hoggart

The Labour MP for Medway hated Tony Blair from the off (when Blair had 93% approval ratings, Marshall-Andrews said: "Seven per cent! We can build on that!"

cam : Politicians in democracies can isolate electoral minorities (for good and bad reasons), I am not surprised that they can't get rid of the CoE subsidy/support because of enough popular support that it is democratically unpopular.

cam : Great quote. Bet that is used every time Marshall-Andrews pops up in an article.

Jacques Chester : This is an interesting development. I think you should consider putting this forward for the next Missing Link.

Or Ken Parish might be interested in it. A lot of Australian constitutional law is based on english constitutional norms.

cam : Jacques, I think it is going to reverberate into Australia because both Au and the UK practice Westminster so closely. Many of the reforms Brown is advocating are directly translatable so I expect it will cause focus on Australian constitutional practice.

avocadia : But there is a firewall between UK and Australian practice called The Constitution of Australia; the more applicable changes that Brown is discussing would have to go through a referendum, no?

cam : Australia (especially the states) has a habit of passing constitutional practice in legislation. For instance the Federal AG having to consult with the state AGs before appointing a High Court judge is in a statutory act. So a lot of these practices can be put into legislation. It means a future government can blast them away if they want, which they cant with a constitution, but it could be done now that way.

guy herbert : So in what way does a House of Lords/Senate that can't do anything against the will of the Commons, as suggested by most candidates, differ from Blears' unicameral approach?

We are already close to it, with a tightly disciplined majority under Blair meaning the executive has not got its way on only a handful of issues, and has only actually been defeated on one significant clause (the one that would have permitted 3 months police detention without charge) in 10 years. There are plenty of unicameral systems where the executive has less power.

cam : I took the all the mentions of not having veto, etc, as not being able to allow the upper house to block supply. I don't personally agree with that. Since, presumably from other answers, they do not want the upper house to originate spending bills, like the US Senate can, then blocking supply is a check and balance.

It requires responsible government, and the Australian Democrats have had issues with trying to come to a suitable method to allow the executive to provide good and consistent government while really only having the blocking of supply as the biggest card up their sleeve.

IIRC, originally Don Chip said he would not block supply, th e concern being that he did not want to precipitate another constitutional crisis like in 1975, however, their policy became that they would block supply if they needed to.

I think the Australian Senate is a good model. I think it is better than the appointed upper houses in other Westminster systems like Canada's, and I think its more limited powers in comparison to the US Senate still allow the House to have primacy.

The UK might not be able to construct federal electorates for the upper house, given its Parliament's national structure, even with current devolution, maybe one super-district with PR would be a just method.

But IMO, the Senate should not be able to initiate money bills, and should be able to block legislation that is repugnant, including supply.

with a tightly disciplined majority under Blair meaning the executive has not got its way on only a handful of issues

That is the probably with parliamentary systems, executive discipline is easy to extend into the legislature as the executive is already embedded in the legislative body. One of the problems the Australian Senate has is that members of the Executive can be in the Senate too. That is something any change to the UK upper house should prohibit. It is important that the upper-house remains a truly legislative body.

adam : Britain does have a statutary Bill of Rights: ... in the form of the Human Rights Act of 1998, passed under Labor and normalising with the European Convention on Human Rights. This was a significant constitutional change, but it would be good to have it in the core document.

Also, if the British political class get some constitution writing experience, maybe they could help make the next version of the European one less crap.

I don\'t think it\'s strictly true to say unwritten constitutions can\'t change quickly; they can change very rapidly if the polity\'s understanding of the underlying mandates change. This is why the House of Lords is an extremely weak House. But you do get weird leftover bits like the Chiltern Hundreds.

cam : By not change quickly: I meant the institutions tend to hang around forever, like the House of Lords, even when they are repugnant to modern political views (ie peerage). They have changing purpose and power, but the institutions build up like cruft. The Roman example of that is the number of assemblies that came out of the royal period, and then the patrician/plebian legal period where they made separate laws for themselves. When there became one legal system all the assemblies remained around rather than collapsing into one assemblic body.

cam

adam : I seem to remember: ... the Venetian constitution doing the same thing. It grew ever more convoluted over time, adding assemblies and commitees. I haven\'t done any serious reading on it though.

cam : To take a software analogy: of I think of the British implementation of Westminster as a group of teenage kids having written spaghetti code in VB many years ago, and now it has many important transactions that it must perform, that it cant be updated and any change to the code is approached with fear for the whole system failing.

I dont understand why Australia seeks to establish the British political heritage. We have innovated far past Britain\'s achievements in political science. Even our states can look back at London and laugh at their pre-industrial structures and electoral technologies.

It is also ironic that we follow British politics and American foriegn policy, when the Americans were the great political scientists and the British Empire had better foriegn policy than the current American manner of power politics, which they play, and play hard.

I guess Britain will require a political leader that can say, lets rewrite it in python! But consensus will probably lead it to being written in perl or lisp.

cam

avocadia : Python?: Bah! Too bureacratic with all its white spacing. \'sides, Ruby (almost) does multiple inheritance.

adam : So?: Python\'s been almost doing multiple inheritance for years :)

adam : Caveat: That is of course the sentiment that prompted me to post. But I think it\'s worthwhile noting that in this case the mechanism has been refactored over time until it is nearly equivalent to a resignation process written from scratch, as it were. Eg on the wikipedia page it described an incident where 15 Ulster Unionist MPs resigned at once. To deal with the resource limitation of only two crown appointments they queued the MPs so technically each held the position for an hour or so.

It does have rather a silly name though.

cam : Holding the position: for an hour or so? Kind of requires a baton to formalise the process, they could hand it on over a 400m section of pavement.

Obviously they have dealt with a niche condition in their system in a manner that works. But often work-arounds like that end up being absurd and speaks to deeper flaws in the system.

Is it a case of conservatism or simply not wanting to muck with it?

cam

adam : Small-c conservatism: I\'d say it\'s small-c conservatism, ie not wanting to muck with it.

avocadia : Whitespace!: froth

cam : Similar experience to Australia: convention is only legislated over once someone breaks it, and it leaves a lasting scar - like the dismissal when Lewis and Bjelke-Peterson went against convention and appointed Senators that were not from the party that vacated the Senate.

This produced a referendum question two years later; Senate Casual Vacancies . It does put parties in the constitution;

Where a vacancy has at any time occurred in the place of a senator chosen by the people of a State and, at the time when he was so chosen, he was publicly recognised by a particular political party as being an endorsed candidate, a person chosen or appointed under this section in consequence of that vacancy, or in consequence of that vacancy and a subsequent vacancy or vacancies, shall, unless there is no member of that party available to be chosen or appointed, be a member of that party.

Where;

(a) in accordance with the last preceding paragraph, a member of a particular political party is chosen or appointed to hold the place of a senator whose place had become vacant; and
(b) before taking his seat he cease to be a member of that party (otherwise than by reason of the party having ceased to exist),

Is it preferable to have former members rotate through a faux position requiring retirement, or to have political parties entrenched in the constitution in order to avoid the race condition that is the reserve powers in the Australian constitution?

cam

cam : A python developer commenting on java: \"I never understood why java developers liked typing so much?\"

I think notepad that comes with windows can handle python indenting. I think that is its default setting.

cam