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Comment by jnwatson | Hacker News Reader

The most obvious difference between the American and British legislative systems is the presence of a foundational document like the Constitution.

The British system is strictly about convention and precedent, whereas Americans have a little more explicit guidance from the Constitution.

I think what we've learned as Americans in the last few years is that it isn't enough to have a foundational document. Convention and precedent indeed play a large role in the function of how the well government works. Congress is now terminally defective, largely because of the loss of the norms and violations of precedent, starting roughly in the mid 90's.

Perhaps the idea that convention and precedent is the only thing holding the British system together makes it stronger.

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> Perhaps the idea that convention and precedent is the only thing holding the British system together makes it stronger.

Coronavirus has been a pretty good litmus test for which countries have good governments, and which countries do not. The UK has consistently led the charts in terms of deaths and infections. I think it shows the fundamental defectiveness of the system itself - a defectiveness that has been pretty visible for years if you looked at the country with a critical eye, but doesn't seem to be often acknowledged, since english people have a cultural prohibition against complaining.

That's ridiculous - in the US, at least, our failure to contain the virus was clearly due more to a substantial portion of the population not wanting to contain it (and this ambivalence being correctly reflected in the government's actions) than any failure of governance.

Of course, these people were a minority, but that just leads to the question of the appropriate protection of minority rights in a democracy, to which there is no obviously correct answer.

Well, in the UK, there are quite clear policy failures that led to deaths (two late lockdowns, 'eat out to help out', etc). It's not hard to see if you look at the graphs, and match them up to when the lockdowns were put in place.

Polls showed that people in general were quite keen on lockdowns, as it so happens.

The data is also as close as you're going to get to accurate in the uk. Just on the topic of comparing graphs.. Again you have made so many assumptions.

Some countries have different methods for measuring covid deaths. For example you have to have tested positive before you died vs autopsy after vs if you died in a care home automatically covid.

I think you're being disingenuous, but there are few raw facts that are worth noting. First, UK excess deaths are worse than the official COVID figures would suggest. This is under-reporting - and it's actually public policy to only include those who die within 28 days of being diagnosed with COVID, so it's not surprising[1].

[1] This policy has some good technical reasons behind it, but its political use is still a bit gross.

This data is still not accurate, excess deaths is a very lagged dataset. Countries that have been upfront and honest with their numbers have high rates, another such one is Belgium. The difference isn't the government response it's the data.

Governance is accurately summarized as getting people to stop doing things they would have otherwise done, or to start doing things they wouldn't have otherwise.

In that sense, it is absolutely a failure of governance. People not wanting to contain it didn't happen in a vacuum... except perhaps a leadership vacuum.

> since english people have a cultural prohibition against complaining.

Complaining about the status quo.

If you ever visited Britain, you'd see how much Brits complain. See: whenever it's raining. Or sunny. Or just grey. Or drizzling. Or foggy.

I am English. I have also lived in Germany for several years. I can tell you that there is absolutely no comparison. Germans expect things to work, and write letters if they don't. English people expect things to be broken, and just want to go on with their day. Perhaps complaining is the wrong term - but for example, where my parents live, the train service has the trick of closing one out of two toilets on the train to save on cleaning. That would be literally unimaginable in any other western european nation, because everybody would complain.

This might be a North/South thing. Generalising massively - I often find that Southern English will entertain huge grievances but never actually do or say anything about them. I kind of conflate these types with tutting Daily Mail-reading curtain twitchers who decry the fall of their society, as they see it, but never raise a peep in complaint.

Up North, people tend to be much more comfortable speaking up and giving a piece of their mind.

Personally, I am a regular writer of letters of complaint, and frequent arguer in the street, haha :)

Drives me nuts when I see people complaining, but not then actually doing anything to resolve it.

You're probably right - I have never lived in the north. Always hear glowing reports. Daily Mail-reading curtain twitchers are a solid majority where I come from.

I'll need to think about that. My first thought was “but they wouldn't do that; they're trying their best”.

> Coronavirus has been a pretty good litmus test for which countries have good governments, and which countries do not... I think it shows the fundamental defectiveness of the system itself

Authoritarian states have been able to manage the pandemic because their residents must do as they're told or suffer. Many others do well because they have cultural cohesion and people are willing to band together for the greater good. That is to say, people must either be willing to act for the greater good or be forced to do so.

Failure to manage the pandemic is more a sign of a liberal government (unable to force) and cultural breakdown (individuals unwilling to act), outside of countries that are actually just not capable.

The UK and US aren't willing to enact forceful measures, which actually think makes them quite good governments, in contrast to China, for instance. The US, at least, has been in a cultural death spiral since the late 60s and completely lacks cohesion. I suspect the UK has similar issues, but I know little about it. That is our actual weakness that has lead us to be unable to manage this crisis. Our government being unwilling to force us is one of our primary strength.

> Authoritarian states have been able to manage the pandemic because

sure, but even poorer European countries managed pandemic better

The UK has also led the charts in finding treatments (eg dexamethasone), developing vaccines, gene sequencing the virus (regularly doing half of the global gene sequencing to find strains), and testing (ridiculous capacity of half a million tests per day).

Frankly in all of these measures of actual state response to the pandemic it has been a leader. It has had high infection rates, but there could be many reasons for that. The UK is never going to have a highly obedient population like in APAC countries, it also has a relatively high density, extremely low sunlight hours and prevalent vitamin D deficiency as a result.

> Coronavirus has been a pretty good litmus test for which countries have good governments, and which countries do not. The UK has consistently led the charts in terms of deaths and infections.

This is a rather silly metric. The UK is also one of the leaders when it comes to the vaccine rollout, far outstripping any European country, several of which could easily end up behind the UK in overall stats before this is over.

Out of desperation to stop the new variants UK decided to vaccinate people with a single dose only.

Anyone care to explain the downvotes?

I’m guessing it’s because it’s unclear how your comment is relevant to the thread.

(I didn’t downvote you)

There's so many assumptions in here you can tell you've never visited the UK.

> The British system is strictly about convention and precedent, whereas Americans have a little more explicit guidance from the Constitution.

This is complicated by the supreme court which is far more political in the US than the rest of the anglosphere, to the point where it's arguably a third chamber of legislature. They have a lot more latitude to reinterpret the constitution as they wish than anywhere else and they provide the precedent that would very often be left to parliament in other countries.

Just to highlight the difference, if you asked a random citizen of Canada, Australia, New Zealand or the UK to name a single supreme court judge they'd probably be unable to.

> if you asked a random citizen of Canada, Australia, New Zealand or the UK to name a single supreme court judge they'd probably be unable to

Don't each of these countries feature sovereign Parliaments [1]?

Congress is not sovereign. It is one of three co-equal branches of government. This, the separation of powers, was a deliberate decision by America's founders.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_sovereignty

There is an (appointed) upper house in Canada and the UK at least, that in theory can act as a check on parliament.

In the real world, separate from theory, the Westminster system seems to have evolved into something far less vulnerable to authoritarianism than the US system. Constant partisan conflict and strife and culture wars down there seem to have yielded a degraded democracy, with the presidency assuming many trappings of a monarchy.

At least the Crown is a symbolic monarchy without real power. I remember being absolutely flabbergasted with the bizarrely reverent way Americans talks about Bush when bombing commenced on Iraq and Afghanistan in the early 2000s; the concept of a "commander in chief" and the general marshal tone of US politics around the executive are quite baffling. But I suppose it makes sense given that the first president was a general.

>There is an (appointed) upper house in Canada and the UK at least, that in theory can act as a check on parliament.

If anything needs reform it's the fucking Senate. Basically the same problems as the US Supreme Court has where whoever's in charge when people die get to pack the upper house of government. I'd happily take at least term limits but I feel like it should either be elected or produced somehow via vote share during the parlimentary election.

> > if you asked a random citizen of Canada, Australia, New Zealand or the UK to name a single supreme court judge they'd probably be unable to

> Don't each of these countries feature sovereign Parliaments [1]?

Australia does not have a sovereign Parliament. The Parliament of Australia is subject to the Constitution of Australia, and the High Court of Australia can and sometimes even does invalidate Acts of the Australian Parliament as violating that constitution. So in that regard, the Parliament of Australia has limited powers just like the US Congress does. The big difference is that while the US has three coequal branches, Australia only has two – the legislative and the judicial branches. In Australia, while the executive branch is theoretically equal to the legislative branch, in practice the executive is subordinated to the legislature.

Actually the question of whether even the UK Parliament is sovereign is debated. Keep in mind the UK has three legal systems: (1) England and Wales, (2) Scotland, (3) Northern Ireland. Northern Irish law is based on English law, so Northern Irish constitutional law has at best minor differences from English constitutional law. By contrast, Scottish law is a completely distinct legal system, with a very different heritage (based on Continental legal system, ultimately tracing its origin to the laws of the Roman Empire), and that includes a distinct body of constitutional law. And while it is true that parliamentary sovereignty is a fundamental principle of English constitutional law, its status under Scottish constitutional law is debated. In the 1953 case MacCormick v Lord Advocate, the Lord President Lord Cooper (the most senior judge in all of Scotland) said that "the principle of the unlimited sovereignty of Parliament is a distinctively English principle which has no counterpart in Scottish Constitutional Law", and left open the possibility that if the Parliament of the UK passed an Act which was a clear violation of the 1706 Treaty of Union which created the United Kingdom – for example, if the Parliament of the UK tried to abolish the independent Scottish legal system and impose English law on Scotland – the Scottish Courts would have the power to invalidate that Act. In practice this question is unlikely to ever arise, because it is politically inconceivable that the Parliament of the UK would ever actually pass such a law. (The case was about whether Queen Elizabeth II was allowed to use the regnal number II in Scotland, despite the fact that Scotland had never had a Queen Elizabeth I – the court ruled that the Treaty of Union said nothing on the topic, so the Queen's choice of what regnal number she used could not be said to violate the Treaty.)

To answer the original question, I definitely remember the name of one former Australian High Court Justice – Michael Kirby (who is famous for being the first openly gay High Court justice). I am a bit of a law nerd, but I don't think you need to be a law nerd to remember that.

The American constitution is notoriously vague. Perhaps the problem isn't that we relied on a founding document too much, but that that founding document didn't provide the foundation we needed because there's too many different ways to interpret it.

> Perhaps the idea that convention and precedent is the only thing holding the British system together makes it stronger.

This echos the Roman senate during the late Republican period quite strongly. They, like the British, depended on precedent (their "Mos Maiorum"). Like us Americans, once the social norms were violated things quickly devolved.

A lot of the British constitution is specified in the legislature. It isn’t precedent that determines who the next monarch is, or how frequently there are elections. Though there are indeed conventions like the way the House of Lords must treat budget bills.

Do you not have maximum time between election? We have that in Canada.

Fixed term parliament act forces a general election every 5 years, unless a 2/3 majority agree a snap election (e.g. 2019’s)

>Perhaps the idea that convention and precedent is the only thing holding the British system

I still remember it wasn't that long ago the British System were laughed and attacked on HN for lacking a document like the Constitution. And how convention and precedent were antique.

Having said that convention and precedent aren't foolprove either.

"As long as human are involved it can always be corrupted."

-Mao Zedong

I suggest if the UK adopted some reasonable constitution it wouldn't change a thing.

Unless some people hoodwinked some sneaky things in there.

But otherwise, it's moot: if you have a highly functional and credible judicial system, and a framework to work from - you don't really need a constitution.

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