Parliamentary Affairs Advance Access originally published online on September 18, 2009
Parliamentary Affairs 2009 62(4):645-662; doi:10.1093/pa/gsp023
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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, New Labour and Constitutional Anomie
Department of Politics,
University of Sheffield,
Sheffield S10 2TY,
UK
Correspondence: m.flinders{at}sheffield.ac.uk
Charter 88 was committed to achieving one central aim—shifting the nature of British democracy from a highly majoritarian polity to a more pluralistic or consensual model of democracy. This article argues that New Labour has not demonstrated a clear commitment to a more consensual or pluralist model of democracy but has instead implemented a bi-constitutional system whereby a system of ‘modified majoritarianism’ has been retained at the national level while at the same time creating more consensual and pluralistic polities in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. However bi-constitutionalism within a unitary state is unlikely to prove unstable in the long-term. A focus on future dynamics opens up space not only for the assertion that it may still be too soon to comprehend the legacy and impact of Charter 88 (because the organisation's work planted certain seeds that may in the long-term indirectly lead to systemic change of the nature it campaigned for) but also because there exists a contemporary need for groups like Charter 88 in providing a new narrative in the form of a holist approach to understanding and shaping the constitutional configuration, thereby providing a form of constitutional morality and ending the current situation of constitutional anomie.