International Impact

By David Brand

The ceremony has changed little in the four centuries since the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. Last week her namesake traveled in an ornate carriage drawn by six gray horses to the Palace of Westminster in London. There, enthroned in the House of Lords and resplendent in a glittering crown containing a sapphire that belonged to Edward the Confessor and a ruby that Henry V wore at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, Queen Elizabeth II opened Parliament. The Lord Chancellor knelt and presented the Queen with her speech, a stilted discourse prepared by the Prime Minister, that outlined the government's legislative objectives for the coming year.

The pomp and circumstance are not meaningless pageantry. Parliament's ritualized opening is a reminder of the enduring roles of British tradition, of the monarchy and of the two houses of Parliament. All contribute to an unwritten constitution etched in customs and laws but not contained in a single document. The constitution has evolved in this way, says Historian Philip Norton, because, since the Norman invasion in 1066, there has been no point at which the system "has been completely swept away, allowing those in power to sit down and create from first principles a new and clearly delineated form of government."

The first constitutional landmark dates back to King John's acceptance at Runnymede in 1215 of Magna Carta, which established limits on the power of the monarch. The House of Commons, which together with the House of Lords makes up Parliament, has its origins in Simon de Montfort's first gathering of commoners in 1265. Another prominent date is 1689, when Parliament passed a Bill of Rights guaranteeing freedom of elections and parliamentary debate.

The precise constitutional tenets are loosely defined, but basically they are laws adopted by Parliament, common law, international agreements, and "conventions," or unwritten rules that have developed over the centuries. For example, in theory the monarch has the right to withhold assent to any bill passed by Parliament. The last time that happened was in 1707, when Queen Anne vetoed the Scottish Militia Bill. Constitutional experts believe such an exercise in magisterial power today would cause a political crisis, possibly leading to the end of the monarchy.

Many Britons point out that an unwritten constitution gives their country more flexibility than it would have with a written document. Making any change in the law of the land is as simple as passing an act of Parliament. Over the centuries, Parliament has become the arbiter of British rights and freedoms because the courts lack the jurisdiction to rule on the validity of legislation.

As a result, the Prime Minister, whose majority party controls the House of Commons, is a powerful executive. "It's hard for an American to understand how powerful Parliament and the Prime Minister really are," says David Owen, leader of the Social Democratic Party. Some Britons are uneasy over the nebulous constitutional assortment of traditions and documents. "Our rights and freedoms are just the gaps between the laws," points out Sarah Spencer, general secretary of the National Council for Civil Liberties. "We don't have any positive rights guaranteed by a constitution. We only have negative rights confined to what is not expressly forbidden." Lord Blake, an Oxford don and constitutional scholar, theorizes that "an extremist party could come to power and pass sweeping legislation."

Indeed, an enforceable Bill of Rights did not come into being in Britain until 1951, when the government ratified the Council of Europe's Convention for the Protection of Human Rights. Unlike most of the signatories to the convention, Britain stopped short of incorporating the agreement into its own law, although Parliament did agree to recognize any ruling by the European Court of Human Rights as legally binding. This has given rise to the curious occasional ritual of a British citizen's going to the European Court in Strasbourg to appeal British laws that cannot be challenged at home. Since 1967, the British government has been challenged in court 27 times by its citizens. The government has lost 14 of these cases, and six are still pending.

Civil libertarians hope that in time the convention will become British law. That could bring about fundamental changes, because at present there is no guarantee of freedom of speech and, therefore, of the press. One way in which the press can be muzzled is through the Official Secrets Act, which gives the government the right to prevent the release of any official information.

Most British people, though, are proud of their country's intense sense of tradition. As Historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, now Lord Dacre, has written, "I don't think that whatever qualities we have as British people come from the blood or from race. They come from the historic continuity of our institutions, which themselves form our identity as long as we remember them."

Enduring splendor: the Queen at the state opening of Parliament

With reporting by Paul Hofheinz/London