The British Constitution
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.29 (969 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0199232326 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 428 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2018-01-19 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
He is a member of the Academia Europaea, a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an honorary life fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He has been Professor of Government at Essex since 1969 and has also taught at Princeton and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Before moving to the University of Essex in the mid 1960s, he was a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford. Pro
There's shrewdness, wryness and insight on every page.' Peter Hennessy, . 'It's very hard to get the British Constitution to rise up and walk and talk. Tony King succeeds magnificently
The old constitution has gone. "As always", he says, "nostalgia is a good companion but a bad guide." Far from shying away from the thorniest issues facing the British polity today, the author grapples with them head on. Most people are aware that a series of major constitutional changes has taken place, but few recognize that their cumulative effect has been to change entirely the nature of Britain's constitutional structure. The author insists that the new constitution is a mess, but one that we can make the best of. The author maintains that, while the new British constitution is a mess, there is no going back now. Anthony King argues that the same is true at the beginning of this century. He argued that the late Victorian constitution was not at all what people thought it was. In the latter part of the nineteenth century Walter Bagehot wrote a classic account of the British constitution as it had developed during Queen Victoria's reign. The British Constitution is neither a reference book nor a textbook. He offers a trenchant analysis of the increasingly divergent relationship between England, Scotland and Wales in the light of devolution and a devastating critique of the reformed House of Lords, whose benches, the author fears, risk being adorned by "a miscellaneous assemblage of party hacks, political careerists, clapped-out retired or defeated MPs, has-beens, never-were's and never-could-possibly-be's." The book is a Bagehot for the 21st Century - the p
"Clear, comprensive survey of the changing evolving British political system" according to dcreader. In admirably clear prose, Anthony King presents his thesis directly in the opening pages: while the British constitution evolved slowly for hundreds of years, that continuity has in recent years been broken by the latest wave of changes in the late 1990s. As a result, "It is scarcely too strong to say that the constitution of the early twenty-first century bears less resemblance to the constitution of the 1960s than the constitution of the 1960s did to that of the 1860sParts of Britain's constitutional edifice, including some of the most visibl