Abstract
British political history does not provide a fixed model of constitutional propriety in respect of advice, but it does confirm that the right of advice has always been contentious and that advice has been a motor of constitutional change. When advice becomes an important issue on the political agenda it is often a signal that the constitution is shifting and changes are meeting resistance from those who stand to lose.
‘On all great subjects,’ says Mr Mill, ‘much remains to be said,’ and of none is this more true than of the English Constitution. The literature which has accumulated upon it is huge. But an observer who looks at the living reality will wonder on the contrast to the paper description. He will see in the life much which is not in the books, and he will not find in the rough practice many refinements of the literary theory.1
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Notes
Bagehot, W., The English Constitution Fontana edn (London: Collins, 1963) p. 59.
Cit. Sharpe, Kevin, ed. Faction and Parliament — essays on early Stuart history (London: Metheun, 1978) p. 41.
Cit. Tanner, J.R., English Constitutional Conflicts of the Seventeenth Century 1603–89 (Cambridge: University Press, 1971) p. 65.
Cit. Neville, Henry, ‘Plato Redovovis 1681’ in Robbins, Caroline, ed. Two English Republican Tracts (Cambridge: University Press, 1969)
Cit. Williams, E.N., The Eighteenth Century Constitution (Cambridge: University Press, 1960) p. 127.
Keir, D.L., The Constitutional History of Modern Britain 9th edn (London: Black, 1969) p. 380.
Cit. Jennings, Sir Ivor, Cabinet Government (Cambridge: University Press, 1969) p. 336.
Butler, David and Stokes, Donald, Political Change in Britain (London: Macmillan, 1974) p. 351.
Cockerel, Michael, Hennessy, Peter and Walker, David, Sources Close to the Prime Minister (London: Macmillan, 1984) p. 189 and p. 191.
See Thomson, David, England in the Twentieth Century (London: Pelican, 1969) p. 219.
See Butler, D. and Stokes, D., Political Change in Britain (1974);
Sarlvik, B. and Crewe, I., Decade of Dealignment (1983).
Berkley, Humphrey, The Power of the Prime Minister (London: Allen & Unwin, 1966) p. 23.
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© 1997 Sue Pryce
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Pryce, S. (1997). Constitutional Propriety and the Politics of Advice to the Executive in Britain. In: Presidentializing the Premiership. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230379992_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230379992_2
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