Liz Truss has taken to Twitter again. Mainly she has been praising Donald Trump for banning paper straws but she also demands that the ‘ancient laws of the British Constitution’ be restored
Trump shows us the way. We need to repeal the laws that have damaged our governance. The ancient laws of the British constitution must be restored. A Great Restoration Bill (Liz Truss, Twitter 7th February 2025)
Truss studied PPE at Oxford which one might have thought would have included at least a glance at Bagehot’s work on the British Constitution, which points out there isn’t a written document as such.
She may have had in mind the Magna Carta of 1215 although only very small parts remain law.
The tweet seemed to suggest that Truss wants to repeat laws passed in the Blair era 1997-2006. There were a lot, mostly as will be the case with any Government, largely uncontentious. Truss however does not specify which of the hundreds of laws in question she has in mind
A better benchmark is what the Freeborn Englishman of the first decades of the nineteenth century thought were his rights (and with which Governments before the 1832 Reform Act tended to acquiesce)
Thompson notes them in the Making of the English Working Class (1963, 1968)
Freedom from Arbitrary Arrest
Equality before the Law
Trial by Jury
Limited liberty of thought, speech and conscience
Freedom to travel, trade and sell one’s labour
This comes from a period before most had the vote. Its questionable whether Donald Trump would agree with much of it, and its certainly the case that thanks to the last Tory Government and the inactivity of the current one there are plenty of issues to address.
Perhaps will see Liz Truss on a few demonstrations…
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