This is the accelerating offensive of the Westminster executive against its restraints: against rival centres of power in Brussels or Edinburgh, against plural interpretations of history, against law itself. Another approaching hard rain is less obvious but more dangerous. One, of course, is territorial: the matter of Scottish secession and perhaps Irish reunion. Constitutional storms are massing over the old United Kingdom. Not the unwritten playground rules that supposedly guide the Anglo-British state, but those semi-sacred printed sheets of paper for which men and women in the outside world have been known to die. Now, with the same pioneering enthusiasm, she has produced a book about constitutions. W ritten constitutions ? ‘Because of where I came from, these documents seemed profoundly exotic.’ In spite of where she came from, which was England, Linda Colley became many years ago the first English intellectual to explain to her nation just how exotic ‘Britishness’ was.
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