Constitutional change and a new Prime Minister

The United Kingdom is about to have a new Prime Minister.

As this blog has pointed out many times, changing Prime Minister mid-term is the norm in British politics. Since 1974 every Prime Minister has either entered office or left office between general elections, sometimes both. And there is nothing wrong or unusual with this, for we have a parliamentary and not a presidential system.

But the one thing a new, mid-term Prime Minister cannot point to is a fresh mandate, with a manifesto endorsed by a general election result. They are pretty much stuck with the same mandate.

Sometimes a new Prime Minister will break with the mandate they inherited. In 1990 John Major dumped the community charge (poll tax) notwithstanding it having been detailed in the 1987 Conservative manifesto. No sensible person doubted that was the right thing for him to do.

Generally, however, any proposed big change will be put off to the next election. There is often too much to do which is more urgent.

The new Prime Minister is likely to be Andrew Burnham, who has been open about supporting constitutional change and even now is expressing support for devolution and electoral reform.

But the eternal problem about constitutional reform is that it means those with power giving some of that power away.

Burnham has nice intentions about giving real power away, and maybe he will actually do something in office. And so on that basis it is more likely than before, but one suspects there is more than enough for a new Prime Minister to do, with the economy and taxation and defence and foreign affairs and so on. So constituional reform is still, on balance, unlikely before an election.

Over at Prospect a couple of weeks ago, I set out more thoughts on this.

Let’s see what happens.