Last month, I invited Britons to think about how to lawfully rewrite their constitution. Michael Reiners, @MCRReiners on X, a Cambridge-educated lawyer and founder of the Restorationist Institute, has offered the first serious proposal: repeal 30 years of bad law, wipe out all of the quangos, and enact my 2020 Free Speech Act proposal – among other things – and do most of the legwork in under one month.
One key part of Reiners’ proposal that mirrors my outline from last month is that it anticipates, without saying it in so many words, that Parliamentary Sovereignty as historically understood must effectively be abolished to permanently restore civil liberties to the UK.
The Restorationist Institute proposal is utterly uncompromising in its ambition and bordering on brilliant in its aggressiveness. Unlike other ideas that have hit my inbox over the last couple of years, Reiners’ is not a carbon-copy of the U.S.’ proposals but is uniquely British, reveals a depth of understanding of British parliamentary procedure, and seeks to exploit (a) the effectively unlimited powers Parliament has already granted itself, and (b) the weak constitutional norms which barely constrain those powers, create new, ironclad constitutional norms. Put another way, it uses Parliament’s unlimited power against itself – to create a new arrangement where Parliament no longer has unlimited power. It describes a very British process that would create a very British constitutional republic. The override function Reiners proposes, for example, calls for a direct referendum with supermajority consent of the people, not supermajority consent of the legislatures and the states. The King’s, and the Lords’, roles are limited in his system.
My June Substack post was less policy roadmap, more air cover for anyone thinking the hitherto unthinkable. Which, at least, Michael and the Restoration Institute guys were doing, and now they’ve broken cover to publish their ideas as well.
While I do praise the brainpower behind the Restorationist Institute’s ideas, I do not necessarily endorse its proposal. There are some things in it I’m a bit ambivalent about and I need time to chew on those things before I am prepared to come out in favor of it or not.
What I will say for now is that, where abolishing parliamentary sovereignty is concerned, I am very glad to see that where I was a lone voice in the wilderness, now, there are two voices – and we are, definitionally, no longer alone.
And indeed, getting to this point was the entire purpose of my post last month. As I told UK Free Speech Union Chief Counsel Bryn Harris on X a few weeks ago, going to print with my post was explicitly designed to shift the Overton Window:
I think your POV is the one more broadly shared among our colleagues in the English legal profession.
My writings on the subject – which propose more fundamental changes to the English system – should be considered by our colleagues as being a contribution made in the spirit of the Israeli “Tenth Man Rule.” That rule states that, in a group of ten men, when everyone agrees on a course of action, there is a danger of groupthink, and thus it is the obligation of the tenth man to dissent and propose an alternative. My “Free Speech Act” proposal and my proposal for a new constitution updating it… are designed to perform that function.
In conclusion?
Sometimes you’ve just gotta launch a meme and see how reality warps around it.