Parliamentary Affairs Advance Access originally published online on August 27, 2009
Parliamentary Affairs 2009 62(4):537-551; doi:10.1093/pa/gsp022
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This article appears in the following Parliamentary Affairs issue: CHARTER 88 AND THE CONSTITUTIONAL REFORM MOVEMENT: TWENTY YEARS ON [View the issue table of contents]
Charter 88 and the Constitutional Reform Movement: a Retrospective
Katzenbach Research Fellow
Centre for Socio-Legal Studies
University of Oxford
Manor Road
Oxford OX1 3UQ
UK
Correspondence: david.erdos{at}csls.ox.ac.uk
This paper argues that Charter 88 was fundamentally both the product and catalyser of an ‘aversive’ constitutionalist reaction on the Left and Centre of British politics to the perceived excesses of Thatcherite Conservative rule. Alongside this, other longer term, secular trends were also important including the growth of a postmaterialist politics and the intellectual collapse of Marxism. However, although a number of Charter 88's domestic reforms were implemented by New Labour post-1997, the complete closing of this ‘aversive’ constitutional moment shortly afterwards proved fatal to the continued dynamism of this movement. Despite this, both the Charter's vision of a genuinely pluralist democracy in Britain and its legacy of a renewed vitality in constitutional debate remain potent within the contemporary constitutional reform landscape.