The Conservative government’s response to the IRAL report has raised plenty of alarm bells from UK constitutional scholars. The widespread observation that the government’s judicial review reform plans appear to go well beyond what the Independent Panel recommended points to a more fundamental problem: that the government seems to proceed from a very partial understanding (at best) of the UK ‘constitution’.
In this short blog post, which draws on the account of constitutional democracy I develop in a monograph to be published later this year by Hart, I argue that the government fundamentally misunderstands (or misrepresents) the UK constitutionalist model. It does so especially when it affirms (at paras 24-25 of its response) that the ‘historical developments’ of judicial review are not ‘in any way indicative of how the courts and the UK Constitution “ought” to evolve in the future’, with the result that Parliament is ‘completely free to…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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