![]() One such attempt took place in 2011, with the passage of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act. It turns out that tinkering with even an unwritten constitution is tricky. Yet it's not clear that a written constitution would have prevented this: a significant lesson of Donald Trump's US presidency is how many of the systems protecting American democracy rely on "unwritten norms" - the "gentlemen's agreement" under yet another name. Many feel Boris Johnson has exposed the limitations of this approach. Instead, its present Parliamentary system has survived for centuries under a "gentlemen's agreement" - a term of trust that in our modern era transliterates to "the good chaps rule of government". Campaigners for the separation of church and state in 1980s Ireland, when I lived there, advocated fortifying the constitutional guarantee with laws that would make it true in practice for everyone from atheists to evangelical Christians.Įngland, famously, has no written constitution to scrutinize for such basic principles. In Ireland, for decades, "freedom of religion" meant "freedom to be Catholic". Although the Founding Fathers were themselves Protestants and likely imagined a US filled with people in their likeness, their threat model was not other beliefs or non-belief but the creation of a supreme superpower derived from merging state and church. The nascent US's threat model was a power-abusing king, and that focus coupled freedom of religion with a bar on the establishment of a state religion. Both were reactions to English abuse, yet they chose different remedies. Ireland, for example, has the same right to freedom of religion embedded in its constitution as the US bill of rights does. All national constitutions are written to a threat model that is clearly visible if you compare what they say to how they are put into practice. ![]()
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