Brexit, Article 50, and a constitutional crisis

[Denzil_DC]

33. Well, they can't override the UK Supreme Court, as things stand.

Laws are drawn up by lawyers. A non-lawyer politician may draft an initiative, but the need for precise wording and consideration of relationships to other legislation make it a specialized and complicated job. We spend a lot of money employing them to take care of these things at the highest level, and even then the legislation can be subject to wrangle and challenge, sometimes years after enactment. (One of the problems with the Thatcher and Blair years was those governments had supermajorities, so there wasn't enough scrutiny of legislation and some really bad laws got passed, but that's a political failing, not a constitutional one per se. Tell me the US, with its constitution, doesn't suffer from the same problem!)

I guess some future government could try to abolish the Supreme Court or make it somehow politically subservient to parliament again, but that's outlandish enough in real-world political terms to be not worth worrying about unless we had an armed coup and outright fascism. There's not a constitution in the world that can protect you against that!

That's as close to a sensible answer as I can give you, really.

What the article above is pointing out is that we're about to enter a shitstorm of uncharted territory in terms of legality and constitutionality. The settlement with Scotland's been cobbled together piecemeal over the years, for instance, and now it's coming back to bite the UK government in the ass. And that's without considering Northern Ireland and the Good Friday Agreement etc. etc. Some of the case law that comes out of all this will eventually go toward clarifying our constitution and the limits of parliamentary power. That's how our system works.

Anyway, it didn't have to be like this. What an epic clusterfuck.