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Comment by _benedict | Hacker News Reader

I’m not sure how a written constitution that is anyway interpreted by “the prevailing political elite class” is functionally much different?

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At least there are words.

The Brits have nothing.

> At least there are words.

> The Brits have nothing.

There are words in the British constitution as well. Acts of Parliament that define how the Parliament and the courts function are constitutional laws, such as the Parliament Acts of 1911 & 1949 and the Constitutional Reform Act 2005. If we are going by words, there are a lot more words in these multiple constitutional documents than in the constitutional documents of many countries that only have one such document.

It's not meaningfully a constitution if it can be overridden in practice by a simple parliamentary majority vote, same as any other law. It's more like the "constitutions" that some absolute monarchies have or had in the past where the first thing is does is declare the monarch above any limits, just not quite as overt.

The constitution is the legal framework by which a country is governed. It is not necessarily a set of super-laws that are harder to change than regular laws (although it may contain such laws). The UK is also not the only democracy where the legislature can amend parts of the constitution with a simple majority. Besides, the UK itself has a super-law that cannot be amended, which is that the parliament is sovereign and cannot be bound by a previous parliament.

Neither the monarch, nor individual Members of Parliament, are above all limits under UK law.

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