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]
Revisiting Charter 88
Sociology, School of Humanities and Social Sciences
University of East London
Docklands Campus
London E16 2RD
UK
Correspondence: m.j.rustin{at}uel.ac.uk
This article reviews the emergence of Charter 88 as a response to a particular political conjuncture in British politics. It argues that its programme of reform was not so much an attempt to resolve a political crisis that had proved unmanageable within the existing constitutional settlement, as an attempt to redefine and achieve the political goals of the liberal left by constitutional means. The article discusses the considerable successes of the Charter, limited only by the fact that the incoming New Labour government of 1997 could afford to dispense with the formal Liberal Democrat support on which the full implementation of the Charter 88 reform programme depended. The article describes how the deeper aim of the Charter to give radical politics in Britain a new democratic republican shape has thus been stalled, caught between the continuing sovereignty accorded by New Labour to market imperatives and their emerging new forms of governance, and a residual collectivist centralism.