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Comment by MrMrkonigh | Hacker News Reader

Well, why does not BBC ask the question: Does Britain have a constitution?

It has a constitution, it's just not on a single document because unlike the US the country was not formed in 1776. The UK is one of the oldest political systems in the world, and already had enormous political and legal complexity at the time the United States declared independence, because of long legal history and the fact that it was running a global empire at the time.

It is completely non-sensical to expect such a nation to have a single document where the constitution is written. It's fucking easy to just write a constitution on a single piece of paper when it's done upon forming the country. It is extremely hard when you have laws going back to the 13th century and you ran a global empire up until the 1950s. It absolutely does have a constitution, and it's a constitutional monarchy, but it simply doesn't have it written on a single piece of paper.

What I'm far more interested in criticising about your idiotic comment is instead that it's just logically flawed. The critique itself originates from Princeton University, which is not a British institution, and the BBC is simply writing an opinion piece on it. Furthermore, what exactly does the BBC have to do with the politics and history of why the UK doesn't have a single piece of paper outlining its constitution? Your comment is practically just an ad-hominem.

Not sure why you are so angry and defensive. But why can't it all be recorded in a single place?

It's made up of different laws and so on. There's nothing stopping anyone writing it all down on a single piece of paper, if you just want to record it all like that (although you'll probably need some legal scholarship to decide what is and is not "constitution"), on a single piece of paper. But it wouldn't hold any particular force.

I suppose if you wanted to make one new legally binding document making up the constitution, the UK could cancel all those laws, recreate the bits of them that make up the constitution in one single place, and then make new laws to fill in all the gaps from all the cancelled bits that weren't part of the constitution. Some of the UK constitution is procedure and books of commentary and theory, so those are going to be awkward to rewrite and put on a single piece of paper, but it could be done.

But why?

The BBC is merely a news agency, publishing articles for you to read. In an article like this they can't be considered hypocritical, which is what your comment seems to suggest. It's not an editorial, nor an accusation.

Quote from the article:

> Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

The study that the article talks about was published by Princeton University (in NJ). But even if it were published by Tsinghua University it would be no less valid. [Economic] science is science.

The UK does have a constitution, but it is not neatly written on a single piece of paper with "The Constitution" written at the top.

This is an interesting aside, but tell me, what's the relevance of your question to the subject at hand? It feels like veiled "whataboutism", but that would be a mean-spirited assumption to make.

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