Constitution of the United Kingdom

In 1827, resolutions were introduced into the Legislative Assembly of Upper Canada, having relation principally to a combination of the two Canadas, but also suggesting something more politic-wise and generally advantageous, viz.

a vice-royalty, with a facsimile of that great and glorious fabric, the best monument of human wisdom, the British Constitution.

That was a quote.

I mean, do you remember reading about that? It's just funny to think of it as a dictatorship.

It is only for that age.

For example, you can see the British Constitution or the French Constitution or American Constitution, it went through so many phases of improvement.

Different clauses were added.

Changes, amendments were often enacted in the legislative assemblies and electoral parliaments.

That's natural.

There's a gradual evolution from Magna Carta to our own time.

British Constitution doesn't remain the same all through.

Like that, there were ancient times 7,000, 8,000 years ago, where people were primitive and women were always under the terrible fear of being kidnapped or molested.

saying he should have told them and he breached shadow cabinet collective responsibility.

Well, under the British Constitution, there's no such thing as shadow cabinet collective responsibility because they're not in government.

And people can more or less say what they like.

They tend not to.

It's a term that's dropped today, not least because the behaviour of England towards Ireland and Scotland in that period changed.

But that revolution was basically seen as the British Constitution and the empowering parliament in relation to the monarchy.

And so when people thought of their own rights and their own freedoms, it was bound up entirely with parliamentary supremacy.

So for the Americans to come along and challenge that supremacy represented a great threat to the whole system in Britain, or at least so they thought.

If I can come in, I'll say that we've built up our political structures, uh, according to what the colonial masters, uh, suggested, forced us or brought us to do.

Uh, when you read many of our constitutions, they look and sound like, uh, the British Constitution, the American Constitut- just even see the, the term in office.

You have some of the countries who have four, four years in office.

Mm-hmm.

One of my problems, Michael, is I don't want to be unkind to anybody because one of the virtues of retiring is you try to become benign about everything and don't always succeed.

But my greatest shock in recent years as a Brit and working with all the chums down at Westminster is just how vulnerable we were when we had a prime minister in number 10 who either didn't know about the niceties of the British Constitution, the careful balances, or couldn't give a fig for them, and disdained what we were there for.

And when the number one guarantor of constitutional decency, because that's what a prime minister is, they're the guardian of the ministerial code, cabinet manual, all these things, when they become the rogue figure, When they become the problem, we're in a terribly difficult position.

And Boris Johnson showed just how vulnerable we are to... somebody who should have known better.

And the really depressing thing is how many people supported him in his own party.

That was a shock to me.

I acknowledge his brilliance, his wit, his charm, but the British Constitution doesn't belong to him.

It belongs to all of us.

Lord Ahmed recently said that he would ask the Lord Chancellor to meet an organisation called the Islamic Sharia Council, including its Secretary General, a preacher called Sheikh Suhaib Hassan.

The meeting would be to discuss the introduction of Islamic divorce laws into the UK Constitution.

Our reporter secretly filmed Sheikh Hassan speaking at Green Lane Mosque.

He's a senior Imam at a major mosque in East London.

And for someone who studied history and politics, it's kind of ruined what I learnt in politics because I did politics from, like, up to 2014, so that was two years before Brexit.

So everything I learnt about the British Constitution is, is, is completely different now.

Like, the textbooks have changed, the academic material's changed.

So it's, it's annoying and it's kind of frustrating.