The reason why our government can overlook the HRA is because parliament is sovereign. No Act of parliament can limit parliament’s power for this reason. Parliament is synonymous with government in this country, so that sovereignty essentially resides in 10 Downing Street.

There is also the Privy Council, one of the great scandals of our democracy – worth reading http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/feb/02/civil-liberties-lords and the report from JUSTICE which it refers to. The Privy Council can make law without any need to go to parliament.

Our liberties are under threat because our constitution allows our government to threaten our liberties. Our constitution is the monarchy, the Crown is the basis of power in this country. It is where the PM gets his power, it is why that power is essentially unlimited.

This is nothing to do with the monarch, it is to do with the monarchy and the Crown – these institutions are the constitution of Britain and are the reason why governments can attack our liberties at will.

I really don’t see a connection here. The monarchy is a bonkers institution, of course, but it isn’t where the rot has set in. This is attempting to marry the crucial issue of civil liberty with a partisan hobby horse.

And for the life of me, I don’t see what the relative significance of manners and laws has to do with the question in hand.

*I derive this from Martin Buber’s distinction between “I-Thou” and “I-It” – in more expressly political terms, the distinction is between relationship (to be welcomed and supported) and transaction to be suspected and restrained). Nations, like markets, are necessary evils precisely because they promote “I-It” over “I-Thou”. Nationalism does this by legitimising the demonisation of the Other – in psychological terms, it excuses the Shadow.

The argument for being a subject is not based in reason. It is based in historical continuity, tradition and aesthetic quality. As an immigrant, I find the idea of being a subject especially pleasing. It makes me feel part of the nation if my allegiance is to the same Crown as everyone else.

Burke once said that manners are more important than laws. What he meant was that society cannot be constructed along lines of rationality alone – illogical customs, superstitious/religious (take your pick) traditions are also important.

In Britain, liberty is protected by the 1688 settlement (see Sean Gabb’s writings on why libertarians should support monarchy). The threat to freedom comes from the elected government, not from a selfless, dutiful monarch.

Your approach simply churns up the mud. The reality is that no British politician can begin a speech as Obama began his Inaugural: “my fellow citizens”. If you think it better to be a subject than a citizen please provide a reasoned, as opposed to an ad feminam argument.

But these things are part of our constitution and they exist. What is the point of taking a wrecking ball to them?

Do you think an elected President will increase liberty? I think this exceedingly unlikely. The biggest threat to liberty in Britain comes from our elected representatives, not from Her Majesty the Queen, who discharges her duties with magnificent selflessness.

This article tries and spectacularly fails to make a connection between the authoritarian nature of the Labour party and the Crown. The two are separate – it’s not the Queen that wants you to carry an ID card.

Don’t tell me that had nothing to do with personality. Similarly the Conservatives have chopped and changed their leaders four times in eleven years. The party stayed more or less the same but the personalities at the top changed.

It did, and it does.

What we now find is that personalities are attacked just as much as policy – Britain now, whether you like it or not, fights an election much the same as the US – hell, look at Drapers LabourList – it is all about who the person is rather than the policy.

The vast majority of the UK population want to retain the monarch – I, even though an expat, don’t – I feel a Republic would be better, so let that point stand.

50% of the people polled – I don’t know where that poll is so if you could give me a link, great! – think that they are voting for MPs? Well that means that 50% don’t and that they are voting for the leader of the party. This leads directly to the fact people need education on how the British Constitution works in schools if needs be.

We as a group of people, I think, understand that there needs to be constitutional change in the UK to give power to the people – to make parliament accountable to them – and that is the right way to go.

But that has to be a matter of firstly giving those MPs more power, not less, first. It is they, as our representatives who will be able to change power – a sweeping written constitution will not happen without the wheels of parliament turning.

Straw says that they are still writing the Bill of Rights – you can guarantee that the wording of that will be so ambiguous that it will mean nought but the status quo remains – parliament does not want to give up the power it has!

I don’t say it is perfect, I don’t think that any written constitution can be, but read the Canadian constitution, hell, even read the Australian one. The EU thinghy was just a mish-mash of nothing – the reason I disagreed with it.

You can, once a constitution is in place, amend parts of it with the relevant power to do so being constitutionally sound.

But just advocating from the get-go that the monarchy must fall means that the reform of parliament and a legal, binding constitution will never happen.

My point is that without sufficient numbers there is no chance of getting any change.

I think the point is – this is something we should be aiming for, regardless of what popular opinion is like now. In a generation, the royalty is unlikely to have any sort of widespread popular appeal.

And from a democratic point of view – I’m totally with Graham – we need a fundamental overhaul of our democratic system. We need to think of ourselves as autonomous citizens, not subjects of a higher power, legally and psychologically.

tim f,

our view on whether the European Constitution manifesto commitment was kept or not depends on whether you think the Lisbon Treaty was similar enough to the European Constitution to be covered by the commitment, and most people who think it was are just relying on what the Sun tells them.

I don’t want to get sidetracked here, but while you are possibly right about what the Sun told most people, it seems fair to point out that the House of Commons Library said “The content of the [Lisbon] Treaty, though not its structure, is similar in a great many respects to the EU Constitution”, the Foreign Affairs Committee (nothing to do with Ugandan relations) said, “there is no material difference between the provisions on foreign affairs in the Constitutional Treaty which the Government made subject to approval in a referendum and those in the Lisbon Treaty on which a referendum is being denied”, and the European Scrutiny Committee said that “for those countries which have not requested derogations or opt outs from the full range of agreements in the Treaty, it [produces an effect which is substantially equivalent to the Constitutional Treaty]“.

Your remark about The Sun is extremely patronising. The Lisbon Treaty is the same document as the constitution. It was deliberately designed to ensure that governments could call it different so as to avoid referendums they knew they would lose. We even had the government arguing that they were different because one had fewer words in it. It was a cynical exercise to get around a very specific commitment. That is undemocratic. I and many others think that and I have never bought The Sun and would be embarrassed to do so.

Parties are not more important than personalities. That is fantasy. We live in a world obsessed with celebrity. That is how the royal family survives. That is also how politics works. People vote for leaders to a great extent. People on a site like this may know about the theory of representative democracy and Parliamentary sovereignty but we are atypical.