perhaps Sunny already thinks PSA targets of each Borough Council/Unitary authority/district council what have you ought to be included in this constitution. and neighbourhood renewal floor targets too.

because if they weren’t in the constititution, we wouldn’t know about them would we?

:-@ mind you, the same kind of people who go around reading up on PSAs and floor targets are prob. the same people who actually know whats in the US constitution.

Justforfun

We would all be forced to subscribe to them and at the end of each year, each citizen can get a bigger or smaller tax rebate. We will of course be rigged up with my Orwell Machine (have I mentioned my Orwell machine before? – its in development at this very moment) – and on the 5th of April there will be a web based uploading of your yearly biometric files to HMRC. Beware missed Targets !!! (such as too much recorded racism or swearing. These will be penalized by immediate direct debit withdrawals from on-shore bank accounts)

Justforfun

like -you know – mission statements – and “principles” that large corporates ( and others) have – which usually you can take to mean what they do is the complete opposite to what they have in a mission statement.

of course, does that mean one shouldn’t have a mission statement? Not necessarily, because people know most of the time it doesn’t really mean anything.

by all means lets’ have a written constitution.
however there seems to be an implication that because there isn’t a “thing” called a constitution, we dont know what we’re doing over here. Au contraire.

One thing I’ve noticed is that we Americans like to MARKET ourselves as BELIEVING in “democracy,” having the right to vote for our leaders, and being active participants, etc. But I’ve come across quite a few people- who weren’t leftist, Chomsky reading people but your average WASP- who spoke about disenchantment with the whole electoral process and not feeling too great about our choices.

I’m totally going off on a tangent, so I’ll stop here

However, I should wipe that grin off my face because I can’t feel too superior over you folks, especially because we’ve still kept the oh-so-archaic second amendment.

And we have legalized a lot of unsavory things.

And the 5th amendment doesn’t really exist for people who are “enemy combatants”- who have never been formally charged, of course.

Also, we are grandmasters at acrobatic interpretations of the Constitution for not so great things.

I could go on and on about the systematic stripping away of our civil liberties and undermining our rights.

“does having a common value written down in paper turn it into a shared reality? shared reality comes from communication with each other, yes people need a shared medium. its called the public sphere.”

Good question, but it’s not simply writing something down on paper; it’s about enacting those things on paper. I do think that there’s something to be said about a codified set of rules that would (theoretically and ideally) be available for folks who don’t have access to the “public sphere”.

“i think the UK is doing a hell of a better job in this regard than the US, constitution or no constitution.”

Hey, if it ain’t broke, don’t try to fix it (but maintenance, upgrading, upkeep are still important).

“there’s much more political apathy in the US than over here.”

I don’t know about that…there are plenty of folks here that are politically active; it’s just that they are folks with whom I don’t agree with and/or stand for things I don’t believe in. The immigration mobilization was huge, though.

And it’s really tough to have a concerted, national political movement because we’re so freaking spread out in a big huge country. Like, it’s easier to get 3 million people to the piazza in Rome to march against the war as they did in 2003; most people can get their on trains from wherever they are in Italy. It’s different if I have to go to Washington DC for a protest for which I will have to fork over around $400-$500 round trip on an airplane (from SFO to DC).

Other reasons for political apathy: people feel like their votes don’t count; people think the politicians are a bunch of liars who care more about campaign money (critique is not untrue); they feel like there are no alternatives other than the Demos and Repubes (who basically sound the same) due to the fact that we have an electoral college that sustains the two party system; they are too tired from work to sit down and educate/inform themselves of candidates (we are working more and longer hours for less money).

I don’t think a constitution or what it says is necessarily ‘British’ or unique. What makes a nation unique are its cultural habits. But it’s difficult to unite people around them since they are so varied and usually a matter of taste.

What’s British about a constitution will be a process and the ownership of such a document. We can use a constitution to express our rights as British citizens.

Although, I’m agreed with Shami Chakrabarti that basic human rights should be applicable and enshrined universally, not just for citizens.

Rumbold: 254 words- you went over.

Why you little…!

Shariq: However the issues are very complicated and a can see a whole bunch of pitfalls. Don’t have time right now, but will try and go into more detail later.

Write an article!

Before I could trust the legal industry to play that much larger a part in the running of the country, it would need radical reform. Perhaps something like setting up a National Legal Service staffed by lawyers motivated at least partly by idealism and respect for the truth.

Rather than being hired by the rich to lie by the hour.

Nah, they only have the right to pursue happiness. That’s a fool’s errand.

in some sense, a constitution is a declaration of freedom, a stepping stone in disengaging from a history and moving onto a new future.

who or what is britain fighting for freedom from?

also, how would you ensure that this constitution is equally representated outside of london, in the places of the country that need it the most?

re: american political apathy, i agree on a national scale but would argue that american communities are much more active on a local scale.

the constitution is i suppose – what we would like to aim for.

so again, in the case of the US, having it written down doesn’t seem to have made much difference to anyone. they all forgot anyway.

just a thought re: the american comparison:

a fat lot of good the constitution did in helping avoid the Florida debacle.

does having a common value written down in paper turn it into a shared reality? shared reality comes from communication with each other, yes people need a shared medium. its called the public sphere. and i think the UK is doing a hell of a better job in this regard than the US, constitution or no constitution.

there’s much more political apathy in the US than over here.

God spare us from some dreary Euro-fudging.

254 words- you went over.

I’d love to have one – I’m just not sure who could write it. Or more accurately, who I’d trust to write it today.

Part of the reason that Americans hold their constitution in such high regard is the passion with which it lays out fundamental principles of government and citizenship. In this age of security before freedom, of compromise and devious interpretation, could we form a constitution consisting of more than very British ‘weak tea’, to be reinterpreted, revised, sidestepped, and ultimately ignored at every ‘emergency’?

I fear we’d end up with a pithy, sentimental and crucially powerless token bit of paper, with every article containing either get-out clauses (smash glass in case of terrorism/union action/recession/bad hair day) or language so open-ended as to mean anything.

Like most attempts to describe “Britishness”, there is little that can not be applied to any liberal state. I agree that codifying “the rights and responsibilities of citizenship” is useful but I fail to understand how this could, or indeed should, be uniquely British.