Assess The Significance Of The Constitutional Reforms Introduced Since 1997

How significant are the constitutional reforms introduced since 1997.

The most effective way to examine the significance of the Constitutional reforms since 1997 is to scrutinise the key reforms to the Judiciary and the Legislative branches of the constitution. Specialising in these two particular aspects helps us to see how the reforms are best understood to promote democratic principles, namely legitimacy, and how they shape the executive and legislative relationship in our current day. This essay presents the view that the three most significant reforms since 1997 are the House of Lords Reform Act, the Human Rights Act and Constitutional Reform Act (2005) which created the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom because of their lasting impact

The House of Lords Reform Act 1999 is significant because of its attempts to improve the legitimacy of the chamber an important democratic principle for the legislative branch. The House of Lords Reform Act changed the criteria of the peers in the House of Lords in an effort to improve the legitimacy of an unelected chamber technically appointed by a hereditary Monarch, which may seem an insurmountable task. The way New Labour did this was to change the perception of legitimacy, D.Beetham in The Legitimation of Power (1991) argues that power can be legitimised “because it can be justified in terms of people’s beliefs”. Beetham’s view is helpful in this case because constitutional reform was used as a political tool for New Labour’s manifesto in 1997 and allows us to see the justification for the limited scope of this reform. The Reform Act has been criticised for its failure to not go far enough in A House for the Future? (Russell and Cornes 2001) concluded that the reform did not “consider broadly enough

A main concern of reform was the desire to ensure that the balance of power between the two houses remained intact. This is perhaps why the second chamber can never be elected, as A.Kelso accepts in Parliamentary Affairs that a truly democratic chamber requires an election for the members of that chamber but argues the Royal Commission mentioned above was right in insisting that “the greater the “democratic legitimacy” of parliament of second chamber, the greater the risk of damaging constitutional conflicts arising between the two houses of Parliament” Kelso also goes on to explain that the commission sought to achieve it’s improved relationship between the two chambers by extending its diversity in a political sense. The Reform Act established a degree of consensus surrounding the potential for a single party domination of the House of Lords. In the wake of the Reform Act, all the main political parties agreed that it would be detrimental to the inter-parliamentary relationship should one particular party have an overall majority in the House of Lords. This recommendation written into the Government’s White Paper (2001), could be a lesson learnt over decades when the chamber was primarily controlled by the Conservatives regardless whether or not the party was either