Stephen Gosling
Our country is, among democracies, uniquely vulnerable. As the initiator of constitutionalism is the 17th century we have never quite completed the project.
Being unwritten ("unknowable") our constitution is nearly impossible to learn. As a consequence it cannot be protected and is only taught in the poshest of schools. A tiny minority of the citizenry have a grasp of it.
Our constitution has no consequences. In recent memory May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak all broke or swerved constitutional laws or conventions and even where that was acknowledged by the Supreme Court there were absolutely no consequence. The harshest possible consequence as it stands is that miscreants have to "not do" the thing they have - more often than not - actually already done. That feels deeply unjust.
The UK's constitution is not "of the people". The absence of the citizenry in the arrival at a British settlement is an entirely legitimate contributor to the growing lack of confidence in our system, it also means you can make a perfectly cogent argument that the UK government has always lacked moral legitimacy.
Using my experience as a salesperson and a businessperson I've been working not just in Unlock but also in MVM (as a board member) in LDER (on the exec) in LDBEN (as a former chair and board member), on the Lib Dem fundraising board, as a fellow of Radix BigTent and with Lib Dem held and target seats and my message at every interaction with every legislator and every policy maker is that; our systems, our foundations, our institutions are dangerously inadequate. And that if oligarchs buy our politics and a demagogue smashes our rights they will have held the door open for them.
The circumstances we're in right now with populist surges on both political wings offer instability which threatens not just investment - a huge material brake on our prosperity and opportunity - but fairness, the justification for voting.
It's my view that reform to a consequential, consensus-derived constitution is a critical step on the road to correcting the UK's imbalance in wealth and opportunity because they stem from our inherent imbalance in power. Currently the UK system's incentives are all wrong.