UK Break Up

Labour leadership contenders seem to be keen on more constitutional upheaval, although I would have thought the Brexit process has completely exhausted public tolerance for that.

The contenders also seem a bit confused as to what it means.  Rebecca Long Bailey has spoken of a need to bring Holyrood and Cardiff on a level" with the UK Parliament, which makes no sense.  The Parliament in London is not English; it is a UK Parliament, which is why Scots and Welsh MPs are elected to go there.  To bring the Welsh and Scots Assemblies "parity" would mean giving them full national sovereignty, but the Scots rejected this in 2014, and the Welsh have never asked for it.

It also begs the question of what you would do with Northern Ireland.  Given the peculiar and dysfunctional state of that polity and the history of how it used to exercise such powers 1920-1972, I hardly think it would be a good idea.

Talk of a codified constitution, aside from leading to all sorts of further wrangles about what would be in it, would actually lead to greater judicial activism and a decline in legitimacy as more examples of popular support would come into conflict with whatever special majority you needed to change your written constitution.

It worries me that these days senior political figures don't seem to understand the implications of what they are saying.  That is quite before you get to the kind of wilful obfuscation being employed by the SNP and the Tories over visas and what is a reserved power and what is not.