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I love this. I love it partly because I could never imagine this happening in the UK. The UK doesn't have a constitution. And I could imagine this getting shut down pretty quickly.

I hope this kind of attitude persists in the US. It's one of the things that continues to give me hope for western style democracy.

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I know people believe this but the UK does have a constitution, it's the sum of laws, treaties, conventions and the Common Law as interpreted by the judiciary over hundreds of years.

It is no less real than the American Constitution. What it doesn't have is a single written document (with amendments).

That makes it a bit harder to go read, don't you think?

It also lacks a fundamental feature the US Constitution has in being umambiguously final. No other law can supersede it. Interpreting an entire corpus of law as a 'constitution' is grossly inaequate.

The U.S. Constitution is far from unambiguous, and U.S. constitutional law can only be understood as a corpus of precedents which explain the meaning of terms which are open to interpretation, like 'due process' or 'freedom of speech.'

I didn't say that the Constitution was unambiguous, but that it is unambiguously the final law.

The UK does have a constitution, it's just not a single codified constitutional document. This has led to some really interesting constitutional documents, for example, a letter to The TImes under a pseudonoym Senex was called a constitutional document in evidence taken before the Justice Committee:

> Q16 Chairman: Is the letter to The Times in 1950 under a pseudonym Senex, which we now know is Alan Lascelles, a constitutional document that now guides us?

> Lord Turnbull:In a strange way,it is,yes; people have accepted the logic of the arguments that he put forward.

From https://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/...

(Incidentally that letter has been superseded by the Fixed Parliament Act).

Your last note shows what the UK lacks - constitution as a supreme document.

In UK, the Parliament is the supreme authority, and can amend that unwritten constitution simply by passing an Act of Parliament, which only requires a simple majority.

In effect, this means that the Parliament is not really bound by the constitution. Which makes it largely useless for the purposes for which it is heavily used and relied upon in US.

> The UK doesn't have a constitution.

The UK doesn't have a written constitution.

So..., it does not have a constitution then?

I normally do not care about down-votes and I still don't but for people who are downvoting me explain to me this: Where can I go and read the constitution that exists but that it is not written down anywhere? It's an oxymoron. So for all practical purposes there is no constitution.

It does, according to wikipedia (at least some sources are written):

> The UK does not have one specific constitutional document. Instead the constitution is found within a variety of written and some unwritten sources. This is sometimes referred to as an "unwritten" or uncodified constitution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kin...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_United_Kin...

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