Moderator : Tom Nairn has published a strong warning against a Gordon Brown constitution which codifies in writing the strong, centralised and ill-liberal all-British state. His article, Not on your Life, is published in the OurKingdom section of openDemocracy. Any comments and responses should be posted here.
David Marquand (Oxford): I think Tom Nairn is being too pessimistic. Perhaps he has invested so much in the 'break up of Britain' thesis that he cannot accept that a constitution designed, among other things, to save the Union can be anything other than conservative. I profoundly disagree with him about this. I think a British - and I do mean British - constitution, explicitly designed to complete the democratisation of this country, would by definition be profoundly radical: indeed, republican.
The crucial question is what about the English? I used to think the English regions could be the counterparts of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as the 'states' of a UK federation, but I'm increasingly coming to feel, if reluctantly, that the lack of strong regional loyalties in England may rule this out. Is a federation of Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and England really impossible? Okay, it would be a-symmetric, but would that necessarily destroy the scheme? Particularly if, as I think is absolutely crucial, subsidiarity is a governing principle. And we need principles. There is a real prospect of historic change. Having saluted Jack Straw as our first Cabinet Minister to call for a written constitution, I have to add that this is not best presented as a matter of "joining the dots", which is what he is quoted as saying, if in an informal context. We need to draw upon basic principles and in doing so base our arguments on the greats of democratic thought. (After all, we're dealing with someone who will soon be the best-read and most intellectually serious Prime Minister since Gladstone.) For openers, 'democracy' is a highly contested term and we ought to clarify our minds about what we think it ought to mean.
