Divisions on Constitutional Issues

Abstract

Both practitioners and analysts might question whether ‘constitutional issues’ deserved much prominence in any discussion of today’s divisions in British politics. Such issues are seldom debated in the House of Commons, nor do they often figure among the questions with which public opinion pollsters try to sample the views of the electorate. Once the idea of devolution had withered in the 1979 referendum, proposals for constitutional change lost the place they had briefly occupied in the centre of the political stage. They became academic or, what was almost as bad, the hobby-horse of the Alliance, which needed proportional representation to enjoy any lasting prospect of power.KeywordsProportional RepresentationEuropean Economic CommunityLabour GovernmentLabour PartyConstitutional ChangeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.