The UK is in what the lawyer and political philosopher Bruce Ackerman would call a ‘constitutional moment’.
There are, obviously, deep and urgent questions about the future of the Union and ‘devolution’. There are related questions about the second chamber of Parliament and the election itself is likely to raise again questions over the voting system. There are multiple questions about the role of money in UK politics. There are challenges around surveillance and liberty in the digital sphere. And, not least, there are profound underlying problems with the political economy which has been built through the existing UK state: the fragility and unevenness of economic growth, employment precarity, long-term wage stagnation and housing market inequality. Multiple problems, rooted in the structure of the state, calling for wide-ranging reform at a basic level: a constitutional moment.
