Yeah we do. British Constitution is ace. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Constitution_(solitair...
Oh, if you meant the government thingy no, we kinda accept that stuff changes... which I think is more useful than holding any one thing as particularly holy and untouchable. The US has got its knickers in a proper twist with all that "money is speech" "what the framers intended was" stuff. It's fetishised. Your 21st amendment even repeals the 18th amendment, what's the point?
The American constitution exists to say that there are some things the government ought not do, even if it makes their job harder, and that if you truly must do those things, you have to convince more than 51% of the country that it's okay. Californian cities can take their own people's guns away, but it is not their place to take them away from rural Kansas, where a cop is an hour away at best. You have to have at least minimal evidence that somebody did something before you can ransack their house.
I readily grant that our current practice is to play silly games to say that these lines aren't being crossed when they are (border phone searches, stop and frisk, you name it).
In the US it gets hung up on "is this constitutional?", which sort of misses an important point.
Handily ignoring the fact that juries are suboptimal, and that at least these people had trials, unlike eg guantanomo etc etc.
I believe we still have Diplock courts. They were actually put in place because internment without trial was considered too draconian. The kind of thing that would never occur with a constitution (give me a G...)
> Californian cities can take their own people's guns away
How does that work? Is California accepting that the 2nd amendment put in the bit about a militia for a reason or something else? I mean, the US Constitution isn't meant to be a state by state menu is it?
> You have to have at least minimal evidence that somebody did something before you can ransack their house.
I believe you have to have reasonable cause. You don't actually need any evidence. And, as you point out, you've all had a few years to drum up some excuses when it becomes inconvenient.
I'm sure having a constitution is comforting and all but, in reality, you're in exactly the same boat as the UK and for exactly the same reasons. We have checks and balances too.
And when the state, in its infinite wisdom, chooses to bend them, we sometimes get quite annoyed (the UK version of angry).
Not having a written constitution isn't as bad as it seems. The government can't do what they want. The courts do rule against them.
We have quite a deep history of law that sets things out. Thousands of years. Sometimes we get silly things, like until recently pregnant women having the right to piss in a bobby's helmet, but it's very much a case of a complex set of rights wrestled from the ruling classes over those thousand years or so.
The government is in a precarious situation at the moment. They are extremely weak. It wouldn't take a whole lot to get this legislation outright neutered. If Tom Watson is working on it, I imagine Labour are doing just that.
A nice example is the slowly shifting norms around executive orders.
A bigger example: didn't both Liberia and Mexico basically xerox the US constitution? The bit of paper, I mean. For clearly the unwritten "ways we do things" in everyones heads were very different.
While the treaty between the states and the federal government has very little reason for change, the rights of individuals need to change as society changes.
But the US constitution does not lend itself to easy modification, so in practice the Supreme Court is used to "interpret" further individual rights into existence.
On the plain meaning of the text, an amendment like "Congress shall make no law …" wouldn't even bind the states in the first place, but apparently it does.
For instance, in 2005 the US was one of the last countries to abolish the death penalty for children, not by passing a law, but on the action of the judiciary interpreting a new individual right into the constitution (i.e. to not be executed for crimes committed under the age of 18). Quite how they managed to get the age 18 out of the words "cruel and unusual punishments" is something to ponder.
Prior to that, the states had an inviolable constitutional right to execute children.
So the US was prevented from ratifying the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child because Congress couldn't make a law violating the right of states to execute children, yet the US states could not individually ratify the UNCRC themselves because that would be violating the right of Congress to make treaties.
The outcome of this battle of rights between governmental bodies, is that children in the US are to this day denied individual rights that they would otherwise have under international law, or even national law, and rely on 12 judges to extract their rights from thin air.
https://www.bl.uk/magna-carta/articles/britains-unwritten-co...
All that article is doing is listing some Acts that contain portions that Brits tend to take more seriously than, say, the Dangerous Dogs Act.
But here's the important bit. Legally, it's no harder to repeal the Bill of Rights that it is to repeal the mangy mutts act.
For example, Parliamentary sovereignty is considered sacrosanct in our constitution. Except we have fairly regularly given it away in Acts and are, presumably, going to get some back in another one because of Brexit.
And Brexit is going to happen because we, randomly, had a referendum about it. In most countries, fundamentally restructuring almost all our treaty obligations of the last 40 years would have a higher threshold than muzzling Rottweilers. Not so in Blighty.
Now, I happen to think that that's not necessarily a bad thing (OK, I think Brexit was scandalous). But we clearly don't have a constitution in any reasonable sense.
In fact the uk constitution predates most of the neat written ones.
[0] www.ucl.ac.uk/constitution-unit/whatis/uk-constitution
A constitution can sometimes be a fairly negative thing. You regularly see US decisions being made against the Constitution where it blatantly isn't applicable. You rarely (ever?) see SCOTUS saying that the Constitution doesn't apply so it needs to go back to Congress for a more applicable law. In other words a Constitution starts to resemble a religious document that has the answer to every conceivable problem if only a priest can interpret it.
For a federal law, either it's within Congress's specifically enumerated and limited powers (as interpreted by SCOTUS) and therefore valid, or else the law is invalid.
For a state law, the US Supreme Court will only base their ruling on the US Constitution if anything legally binding at the federal level (including but not limited to the Constitution) forbids or allows that state law.
Otherwise, SCOTUS and every other court will defer on state law to the state Constitution as interpreted by state courts, but from a federal constitutional perspective, states can pass whatever laws aren't federally forbidden.
Same goes with guns. If you want everyone to be armed then fine. That's your prerogative. But the Constitution clearly didn't mean for everyone and their mom to be tooled up with semi-automatic weaponry. I mean, just how legal are militias in the US? Because they're the reason you should be carrying.
It was clearly a document of its time. And one of international importance. But the religious zeal to which it is adhered to is highly questionable.
Now, it's not like we're perfect in the UK or anything. But if someone tried to justify something to do with smartphones or terrorism by referencing Magna Carta or the Bill of Rights, we'd probably take a step back and give them a napkin for the mouth frothing.