A-Level Politics: UK Constitution, Devolution and Rights

The UK constitution is the topic where the most confident wrong answers live, because almost every key term has a looser everyday meaning. So the questions here are situations, and the work is to say precisely what follows.

It opens with the claim a commentator makes at least once a year: that a country without a single constitutional document has no constitution. Uncodified means the rules are in several places — Acts, decided cases, practices that everybody follows — not that there are no rules, and the option saying otherwise is the one being tested. The three sources then get matched to examples, with a convention offered as legally enforceable for anyone who has not noticed that the thing which makes a convention a convention is that no court will make you keep it.

Two questions are about the limits of what Parliament and the courts can each do. An Act declares that no future Parliament may repeal it, and a later Parliament repeals it anyway: on the orthodox account the declaration cannot bite, because the doctrine that gives the first Act its force gives the second one exactly as much — which is why entrenchment sits so awkwardly here, and why constitutional lawyers still argue about manner and form. And the Supreme Court interprets a statute in a way the government dislikes, where the answer is that the court has said what the Act means and Parliament remains free to pass a different Act tomorrow. Neither question repeats judicial review or select committees, which belong to the other UK set.

The rule of law is treated as a set of requirements rather than a phrase. A council enforces a licensing rule against the traders who criticised it and ignores it for everyone else, and separately fines someone for conduct that broke no rule at the time — two different breaches, one of equal application and one of the requirement that a rule exist before the conduct it punishes.

Devolution comes next, as a grant of power rather than a division of sovereignty, with federalism available as the wrong answer; then the asymmetry of different bodies holding different powers and one part of the state holding none. A right kept in an ordinary Act is exactly as secure as Parliament's willingness to leave it there, which is the argument both for the arrangement and against it. The codification debate is given as two people and two arguments, so the work is attribution rather than agreement. And a significant constitutional change made by an ordinary Act, passed like any other, closes the set — a difference from systems that require a special majority, not a defect.

Every case, dispute and person described is invented. No real party, politician or government is named, no statute is invented, and no decision is attributed to a real judge. Nothing is reproduced from any exam board specification, past paper or mark scheme.

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• Say what uncodified means and what it does not
• Match statute, common law and convention to examples, and say why a convention is not enforceable
• Explain why an Act cannot entrench itself against a later Parliament
• Name the requirement of the rule of law breached by selective enforcement and by a retrospective penalty
• State where sovereignty sits under devolution, and why devolution is not federalism
• Describe asymmetric devolution accurately
• Say how secure a right held in an ordinary Act is, and give the argument on each side
• Say what a court does when it interprets an Act, and what remains open to Parliament
• Attribute the arguments for and against codification to the right side

Ten invented situations: a commentator declaring the country has no constitution, three rules of different kinds in one dispute, a licence enforced selectively and a fine imposed retrospectively, a devolved legislature straying into a reserved subject, bodies with different powers and one region with none, a right kept in an ordinary Act, a court interpreting a statute against the government's reading, two people arguing about codification, a constitutional change made like any other Act, and an Act declaring itself unrepealable. Twelve flashcards carry the vocabulary — uncodified constitution, statute, common law, convention, parliamentary sovereignty, entrenchment, the rule of law, devolution, reserved powers, asymmetry, codification, unitary state.