How's your constitution?

With the UK election now over and a change of power in progress, what can we expect to actually happen within our archaic state framework? Tensions with regional governments are never going to go away, and ecological challenges are only going to increase - is a lack of a UK Constitution going to help or hinder the change we require? Let's have an unreasonable debate...

'Change' was the one-word, no-nonsense tag-line of the Labour election strategy which came in for derision from trounced and salty Tories but, who's listening to their whining after fourteen years of talking an excessive amounts of bollocks? The media also piled onto it with a distinct lack of anything else to talk about - apart from the proliferation of racists in ReformKip of course. The fact that Rishi 'Rain Dance' Sunak gave so little campaign time and surprised his own government with a snap election, was hardly surprising in these TikTok 'you've got 3 seconds to make a complex point' times. Labour's one-word tag-line strategy was perhaps not so daft after all. As a natural Labour voter, I should have been swept up in enthusiasm around that one word, but Keir 'No policy, no criticism' Starmer soon extinguished that with his flat refusal to contemplate meaningful change to the relationship between Scotland and Westminster. I would love to be as excited as 1997, but times have changed and, sadly, the UK hasn't kept up in its ambitions.

So why am I banging on about a constitution? What steers the UK and its constitutional monarchy in terms of its goals and ambitions? The answer is the laws of the land and the Monarch as the head of state with no particular guiding principles other than a loose, misty-eyed desire for everyone to have a right to be a corner-shop owner and prop up the property market. While the monarch's status is touted as being purely symbolic (they never refuse to disband or form parliaments around elections, for instance) it has become very clear that they are not averse to interfering in the creation of laws, curiously almost exclusively around taxes they may have to pay. Funny that, isn't it? You don't see them stepping in and saying 'make that law a bit more friendly to the poor, please'. With no constitution, who pulls the levers of power and for what reason gets a bit murky after we have had our say, once every five years.

Interestingly, there was a consultation exercise, over five years, regarding a UK constitution which, apart from supplying additional income to its creators, seems only to have generated the idea of the UK Bill of Rights for Terrible Tories to wave about as a reason to abandon the Human Rights Act. Metaphorical land mines and pit traps around the British coast please! Scotland is also consulting on a constitution looking at how the country defines itself in a modern world as an independent nation - how this develops in a couple of years if the SNP lose power for the first time since 2011 will be interesting. I am encouraged by some of the ideas emerging around this discussion, particularly in relation to the view on economic development in a sustainable way with grass–roots discussion around the constitutional question. At UK level, the discussion seems to be dead in the water and the perpetuation of governance by the two-party, five year election cycle looks to be the UK future. The Labour Party have been coy on electoral reform, only committing to reforming a Tory-packed House of Lords (surprise!). Their depressingly familiar approach to fixing the economy with growth, growth, growth was another factor that turned me off. But, I guess they can't be blamed for avoiding any original thinking after the economic antics of Liz 'Lettuce' Truss.

Mmmmmm. Doughnuts!

I will confess a lot of this thinking has been inspired by a random encounter with Kate Raworth on an episode of 'The Rest is Politics: Leading' podcast (not an advert - no payments received). Kate's world view makes complete sense and chimes with my own; the challenging of the thinking of two dyed-in-the-wool political thinkers and their acceptance of it was refreshing. The books initial explanation of the development of Economics in a very narrow way, with Gross Domestic Product as the cuckoo that dominates the nest and pecks all other goals to death, explains why humanity is in the situation where billionaires think it is absolutely feasible to spend their time, money and effort (or rather the effort of specialists) searching for another planet to exploit rather than fix the one that economics has spectacularly broken. We've certainly moved a long way away from the original ancient Greek definition of Economics as 'Household Management' - oikonomia.

I'd encourage looking into Kate's work and, to loop us back to the start of this unreasonable debate, it's why I started to wonder how the UK and other countries hold politicians and political systems to a goal of ensuring their citizens thrive without destroying the planet that sustains them. Depressingly, the answer seems it's not a very common consideration and, even though younger generations love to blame those that preceded them for the world's ills, there seems to be very little in the way of action or will to fundamentally change the systems we use to live, love and work for the betterment of the planet. If someone had explained economics to me in terms of human behaviour when I was younger, it might well have been a direction I took myself in... despite a deep-seated hatred of maths.

There are bright spots to be found in the world, however. While the 'great' democracies of the UK, US and Europe tie themselves up in trying not to become far-right hell-holes, countries such as Bolivia, Chile and the Netherlands have enshrined a right to health in their constitutions. Despite the UK having a National Health Service (currently on its arse after 14 years of death by a thousand cuts), the lack of a constitutional commitment to health rather amusingly places us below Russia on this measure. For balance, we're currently less likely to conscript our citizens for meat-grinder illegal wars, so... context and all that, but governments change and strong guiding principles are important.

In conclusion, while I welcome the 'Change' that has been voted for in the UK for the next five years, I am a little dubious on the scale of change for the better that we may see. This isn't because 'all politicians are the same' - a lazy argument perpetuated by those political parties keen on people not examining what they are really like - but rather that the UK political machine exists in a tired, 17th century model as vulnerable to environmental and social changes as the Houses of Parliament itself. Struggling against the ravages of time and a rising, shit-filled Thames seems like a very apt symbol of UK politics. The sooner Kier and his team fire the starting gun on meaningful electoral change, the better. Then, like in Scotland, I could vote with my beliefs, knowing it will have an impact, rather than the infantile, playground antics of the first-past-the-post system.