Anthony Barnett (Brexit has shattered our constitution. We need a written one, and quickly, 30 November) makes clear that defining sovereignty by means of a referendum on complex issues which few understand “is the raw meat of dictatorship”. So too is the “executive dictatorship by the Tory government and the nativist right”, given that the only alternative may be a similar dictatorship from the left. Only a sovereign parliament can create the legislative structure, a written constitution if you will, needed to preserve this country as a properly functioning democracy. Parliament’s defence of its sovereignty in recent years has been feeble. It has allowed the executive, for example, to go a long way to destroying a local government system managed by locally elected people, and to creating a nationalised school system in England, controlled by a government minister or by agencies contracted to or appointed by that minister. One can only hope that the supreme court will persuade parliament to stop waving its order papers about and to concentrate on its duty to defend this country from dictatorship, from whatever source.
Peter Newsam
Thornton le Dale, North Yorkshire
• When reading philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) at Oxford in the late 1950s, we were made aware of the thesis that, after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, there was introduced into Great Britain a sole fragment of a written constitution: the Act of Union 1707, a treaty between two sovereign nations. Perhaps David Cameron, who also read PPE, justified to himself the referendum of 2014 on such grounds.
But when it comes to Europe and the voice of the people, we should remember that of the 27 other countries, all with written constitutions, very few required a referendum to confirm EU membership. Anthony Barnett reminded us that 1688 set in train safeguards “from would-be dictators and, especially, democracy”.
Europe’s leaders, with the exception of Cameron, instinctively heeded the warning given around AD790 to Charlemagne, king of the Franks, by Alcuin of York, which has been summed up as “Vox populi, vox Dei”. The whole quote is translated in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations thus: “And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness.”
Iain Mackintosh
London
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