Stardate 20030525.1706

(On Screen): For an American like me, who is used to having an explicit Constitution which clearly spells out the powers of government and the limitations on it and the procedures it must use in various kinds of activities, the British system has always seemed deeply worrying. Many of our rights are explicitly spelled out either in the Constitution or in critical Amendments which were ratified later, most particularly our right of free speech, free press and free assembly.

But the British have no such charter. The people of the UK have nearly as much liberty as we do, but it's always seemed more perilous. They have free speech, free press, free assembly, but they could lose it if Parliament passed certain laws. And indeed, there have been times when the press in the UK were subject to significant limits which would not be Constitutionally possible in the US.

The UK has now reached the point where it needs to make two critical decisions: whether to ditch Sterling and use the Euro for money, and whether to join the proposed United States of Europe and place itself under the new European Constitution.

If the US were considering such things, it's extremely clear what would be needed: constitutional amendments. If there were, for instance, a proposal to form some sort of Pan-American Union (with government in Brasilia) and the United States were considering whether to give up its sovereignty and to become part of a larger hemispheric meta-nation, then Congress and the President could not carry out such a thing merely by passing laws. They'd have to pass an amendment and propose it to the state legislatures, and three quarters of them would have to ratify it.

And that is as it should be. For a decision that big, that important, that critical, it should not be left to a small number of leaders to decide. We cannot permit 536 people to end the history of our nation. The real debate about it would take place in the individual states, where the state legislators are far closer to and more attuned to the opinions of individual voters. In a decision this momentous, the decision ultimately must be made by the voters themselves. There would not be any kind of national referendum about it as such; there's no constitutional provision for such a thing. But as a practical matter, the legislatures would express the will of the people of their states. That's always been the case in the amendment process.

And as a practical matter, there's not a snowball's chance in hell of such an amendment actually being ratified.

There's been continuity of government in the UK for a long time. How far back, exactly, it goes depends a lot on what you mean by "continuity". For example, some might claim it goes back to the Norman Conquest. Some might place it at the Magna Carta. Others who were less generous would point out that it would have to begin after the end of Cromwell's period. Indeed, it's arguable that the current form of government really only begins with Queen Victoria, because that's when the monarchs of the UK ceased to actually wield significant temporal power.

Likewise, who exactly would have been considered "British" varies at different times. The Welsh were pretty much conquered and integrated by the 15th century. The Scots, on the other hand, took a lot longer, and indeed maintain a degree of separation even today. For a long time the Irish were part of it, but never accepted that and ended up becoming independent again. Still, there was a feeling amongst the islanders that even with their mutual differences, they were apart from those grubby people on the Continent.

Now they're considering giving it all up, and Tony Blair wants to do the deed of ending hundreds of years of British independence and sovereignty with a procedure approximately the same as he would use to pass a traffic law: via an act of Parliament.

It's not going too far to say that this is the most mementous decision to face the English (and the rest of the British) since the Civil War, when Parliament made the deliberate decision to oppose their own monarch. In a sense, it's even greater than that one. The British are seriously considering giving up their independence and yielding the bulk of governmental power and control to a foreign capitol which will be dominated by people from other nations, who will have the constitutional power to impose laws and policies and regulations on the British even if the people of the former UK strongly disagree with them.

Former Prime Minister John Major writes in The Spectator that a decision this big cannot be made solely by Parliament, or even worse, by the Cabinet. I think that from a moral perspective he's right: this must be a decision which the people of the UK directly participate in. But under the British non-system, where the power of the government is whatever Parliament says it is, it is actually possible for Blair to terminate British independence and submit to foreign rule without any kind of extraordinary action.

In fact, if the decision were submitted to a plebiscite, right now the best guess is that it would be defeated. And indeed that seems to be Blair's primary reason for not wanting to submit it to such a referendum: the voters would get the wrong answer.

Which brings up another deep difference betwee