David Marquand has a thought-provoking piece at OurKingdom, arguing that Gordon Brown's Government is the best opportunity that constitutional reformers are likely to have for some time. Ironically, this suggestion might be more relevant in England than in Brown's native Scotland, where the SNP offers an alternative way forward:
What Labour now needs to do is to revisit what I think of as the ‘democratic republican' strand in its heritage - the strand that goes back to Milton's thunderous prose and Tom Paine's magnificent audacity: the strand that emphasises self government by free and active citizens in a polity they own. Unless and until it does, and explains how this is enhanced, not diminished, by sharing sovereignty with others in the EU, its social democracy will be crippled and self-stultifying.
From that perspective, Brown's talk of Britishness, British values, and a British Bill of Rights and Duties takes on a new, and potentially worrying dimension. I admire Brown enormously for having the courage to call for a national conversation on theuse matters; none of his predecessors has dared to do anything of the sort. But in the absence of a clear commitment to replace subjecthood with citizenship - to locate sovereignty in the citizen body as the French and Americans do instead of in Westminster and Whitehall - I fear that ‘British values' will turn out to be restrictive and backward-looking, and that the proposed British Bill of Rights and Duties will make it harder to give effect to the rights already contained in the Human Rights Act.
