A written constitution?
Sir: Anthony Lewis has got it wrong again .(Letters, 5 April). He says that in my article ('The case against a written constitution,' 29 March), I accused him of advocating 'instant and wholesale transfer of the American con- stitutional system' to Britain. I did not so mis- represent his position. He goes on to describe my argument as 'extreme,' a laughable charac- terisation of an argument for retention of the status quo. Then he says I argued that 'a par- liamentary democracy simply cannot have a binding written constitution or bill of rights.' Actually I said the reverse, while suggesting that any attempt to impose a written constitution on Britain at this late stage would present vast difficulties.
Having established that he did not read my article very carefully, he then displays his ignor- ance of what social scientists are doing these days. He accuses me of having read a book, and to that I plead guilty. The irony is that the book to which he refers (Almond and Verba, The Civic Culture) is not the abstract, ivory-tower essay which Mr Lewis imagines it to be, but a comprehensive, systematic report of interview research embodying more profound and re- liable findings about the attitudes of ordinary Britons•than anything even a capable journalist like, Mr. Lewis turns up.
Although. Mr Lewis will regard the matter as
a 'political-science abstraction,' I. note that he continues. to duck the basic issue of how one binds future British Parliaments. His lame sug- gestion that the matter be left to 'the British genius for political invention' is not good enough.
Malcolm Shaw Lecturer in Anglo-American Comparative Studies, University of Exeter
Previous page
