The travails of Theresa May in trying to achieve Brexit have been well documented, including in this article here! However, it is easy to forger now that when Boris Johnson became Prime Minister, he faced his own significant challenges.
Continue readingWhat is sovereignty?
Sovereignty refers to ‘supreme authority’ or ‘ultimate legal power’. In Britain, the notion of parliamentary sovereignty – that sovereignty is held by the institution of Parliament – is one of the most important principles of the British constitution. Indeed, the constitutional scholar A.V Dicey called parliamentary sovereignty one of the ‘twin pillars of the constitution’, the other being the Rule of Law:
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Since the Supreme Court was established in 2009, there have been a number of significant examples of judicial review that have taken place. As the UK’s final court of appeal for both civil and criminal cases, the Supreme Court is the final judicial adjudicator on key legal and constitutional issues bought before it. Cases come to the Supreme Court after they have previously been handled by the lower courts:
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Recall refers to the power to remove (recall) an elected politician from office. Recall is an example of direct democracy and theoretically gives voters significant control over their representatives. In Britain, the Recall of MPs Act (2015) gave voters some power to recall MPs in certain circumstances.
Continue readingWhen the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act was passed in 2011 it was sold as a significant constitutional reform that would modernise the UK constitution and give more democratic legitimacy to the House of Commons. Prior to this, the calling of General Elections was governed by both statute and convention:
Septennial Act 1716 – This Act mandated that a General Election had to be called at least every seven years. In 1911, the Parliament Act reduced the maximum length of each Parliament to five years.
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