A Modern Democracy

Abstract

Britain today is probably less democratic than it was in the 1930s. The British constitution since then has barely developed at all, although society has rushed past it in a way that makes its provisions more remote, unrepresentative and inadequate. This halt in constitutional development, in the deepening of British democracy, marks a complete break with the country’s previous tradition of constitutional evolution, which did two things: it kept British government roughly abreast of social change; and it defused the tensions that occur when a political system fails to keep up with social change. Britain escaped the wave of European revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries largely because it bowed, through the Reform Acts, to the pressure for political change and the eventual demand for universal suffrage.