The United Kingdom and Human Rights - College of Social ...

124 Values and Civil and Political Liberties
88, the current main protagonists of a new constitutional
settlement. These issues are so large as to require a book
themselves—and perhaps the 1977 analysis by Nevil
Johnson, In Search of the Constitution: Reflections on State
and Society in Britain cannot be bettered, only updated. 16
Nonetheless, some comments are here necessary about
institutions which further human rights values and are
the legitimate concern of every citizen in a modern state.
If the constitutional arrangements do not make provision
for a significant value, or if certain values are perceived
as being inadequately implemented or protected, there
are likely to be demands for change. Currently the main
barriers in the United Kingdom to change, good or bad,
are only the good sense of members of any governing
party and the fact that because any status quo is
privileged, those who seek change face in practice an
onus of proof, even if not too high a one.
In the last 20 years there have intermittently been
demands by those at the time excluded from power for a
new constitutional settlement. Unfulfilled Scottish and
Welsh national aspirations for greater autonomy have
been invoked in devolution debates. Those claims can
properly be described as ones to the right of internal
self-determination, and, in the case of the Scottish
Nationalist Party, to external self-determination. Belief by
smaller parties that they are proportionally underrepresented
and that the present electoral system is in
this sense undemocratic have stimulated demands for a
proportional representation electoral system. The growth
of Cabinet power, as a result of the party system
operating through the Parliamentary whips, has undermined
the House of Commons as a genuine decisionmaking
body—although anyone who thinks that such
criticisms should be confined to one party should
recollect Harold Wilson's remarks about dogs getting
back into their kennels. Then there is dissatisfaction with