In this chapter, we argue that while it has often been suggested that utility models are a product of late nineteenth-century German thinking and that they are foreign to the United Kingdom, utility model protection was first introduced to the United Kingdom in the Utility Designs Act 1843. As such, it is clear that utility model protection has a long established (albeit somewhat tarnished) pedigree in British law and that utility model protection came into force in the United Kingdom some fifty years before its German counterpart. In this chapter we highlight the key features of the Utility Designs Act 1843, the way the Act was received, and speculate on the reasons why the Act was forgotten

Arriving at the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1737, Johnson soon plunged into workaday journalism which absorbed a great deal of energy for little pay. After an unsuccessful attempt to leave, he settled to his task, including the labour of composing parliamentary reports without entering Parliament itself. He began to develop an essayistic style, and to establish a certain attitude towards journalism itself: wary of sensationalism and propaganda, but respectful of the functions of the ‘humble author’ in providing harmless entertainment and useful knowledge. This was good preparation for the Rambler series, sometimes seen as the pinnacle of Johnson’s work: an ironic, self-deprecating set of twice-weekly essays, which amounts to a sustained study of human nature and human existence. In his later Idler essays, Johnson introduced a lighter touch, and in his articles for the Literary Magazine, he gave a Johnsonian treatment to such topics as beekeeping and electricity.

This chapter introduces the notion of an ad libitum or at-will use of the constitutional concept of public order. The concept of public order fulfils an important role in the protection of minorities but also extends far beyond the interests of religious and ethnoreligious minorities. The Dutch prohibition of the full-face veil demonstrated a susceptibility of the concept of public order to social norms. Initially a flagship of Geert Wilders’ anti-Islam movement, the Cabinet in some ways successfully captured the topic and diminished the language of aggressive othering of Islam to issues of communication and a vague concept of living together. This could be understood against the backdrop of political gains made on the far-right across Europe, and the law perhaps contributed to an attempt at containing this threat of political gains from the far-right.

Hume’s ‘Of Eloquence’ – in which Hume implores English orators to imitate the sublime style of Demosthenes – has long puzzled readers, for two reasons. First, it is rare for Hume to present ancient examples as suitable for moderns to imitate, particularly where politics is concerned. Second, in the essay’s conclusion, Hume seems to backtrack by encouraging English speakers to give up on sublimity and introduce more order and method into their speeches instead, inviting the accusation of incoherence. In this chapter, I show how reading Hume’s essay through the lens of ancients and moderns is limiting and that a comparison between the political cultures of England and France was central to his analysis. For Hume, the lack of sublimity in Parliament was a specifically English problem with roots in the English national character. If the revival of classical eloquence that Hume desired looked unlikely to him, I argue, this was due less to the unsuitability of sublime speech to a modern society than to the peculiar place of Parliament in Britain’s mixed constitutional order. I also demonstrate that Hume’s closing call for more order and method in English speechmaking was consistent with his earlier endorsement of the sublime.

Farage also used ‘we’ to show that he identified with ‘the people’. The ideas underlying this phrase need to be understood in their historical context, since they vary depending on particular national histories, but all share a common ancestor in ancient Greek and Roman thinkers. British democracy needs to be traced back to British thinkers such as Buchanan, Hobbes and the philosophers of the Enlightenment. This is relevant because the historical discourse surrounding the phrase ‘the people’ was central to the development of democracy, and is continuous with today’s challenges to it. The various notions of ‘the people’ were connected with the ‘sovereignty of the people’ and the ‘sovereignty of parliament’, the latter being expressly challenged by populist parties like UKIP, in favour of direct democracy, and the same trend was evident in the post-referendum governments. The expression ‘the common people’ played an important role in British political discourse. Its early meaning changed radically until it was replaced by ‘ordinary people’, which in the Brexiter demagoguery was equated with ‘the people’, in opposition to ‘the elite’.

A sustained period of Conservative government would normally be expected to usher in constitutional stability. But the reverse was largely true for the period 2010-24. During these years constitutional controversies were rarely far from the news, partly thanks to deliberately planned changes, but mostly due to radically shifting conventions and political behaviour. Across the time period, the direction of change was also very far from consistent. The initial coalition years were marked primarily by pressures towards greater constitutional pluralism, though Liberal Democrat reform ambitions were often held back by Cameron’s Conservatives. Later, any prospect of calm under single-party government was soon punctured by the pressures of Brexit. This eventually brought into question almost every aspect of the UK’s constitutional arrangements, and inflicted painful splits within the Conservative Party over questions of governance. In particular, Boris Johnson’s populist approach was characterised by wholesale disregard for constitutional norms, and highlighted vulnerabilities in the UK’s key democratic arrangements which few would previously have anticipated. If one commonality can be discerned across this fourteen-year period of constitutional extremes, it is the largely unconservative nature of policy.

The Australian Federal Parliament stands magnificently atop Constitution Hill in Canberra as a symbol of the importance Australia attaches to its long and strong democratic tradition. The semiotic message of the Parliament’s architecture is that this is a people’s place, ‘a publicly accessible monument’, a place where its visitors will be as much a part of the fabric of its business as the business of the legislature. The Parliament has used technology to match this physical accessibility such that never has there been a period when greater access to the business and deliberations of the Parliament has been more possible. This accessibility has, however, been matched in the period under review by increasing physical constraints and barriers to access never envisaged at its creation: for the first time in the history of the Commonwealth, the Parliament was closed to the people – on the occasion of the visit of President George W. Bush in October 2003. In this way, the Parliament stands also as a symbol of the way the world has changed since the bombings of the twin towers in September 2001.

The chapter begins with a paradox, namely that the liquor laws were liberalised in the early 1960s at precisely the moment when the apartheid regime was becoming distinctly illiberal. It argues that part of the reason was that the temperance movement had failed to reproduce itself generationally while its influence on the National Party government was marginal. Moreover, Afrikaner nationalists hitched wine to the bandwaggon of cultural nationalism. Successive commissions of enquiry targeted excessive drinking amongst the Coloured population, but attempts to extend the reach of racialised prohibition stalled. Indeed, the racial provisions of the 1928 Liquor Act were repealed in 1962, following the Malan Commission which maintained that the law was being routinely flouted. After a heated parliamentary debate the law was amended such that that wine could be purchased by all South Africans. Moreover, the distribution became freer with the creation of grocers’ licences for wine and promises of intervention to reverse vertical integration in the liquor industry. This outcome signalled a defeat for temperance interests and pointed to the greater influence wielded by the wine lobby.

In this chapter, we explore how the transfer of power between the monarch and the prime minister occurred, when it happened, how the monarchy survived, the importance it still has in Britain, and how far the prime minister has effectively become the head of state as well as head of executive. The monarchy continued to exercise real authority for the first 200 years of the prime minister’s existence and beyond, up to today. The rebalancing of power was painful, faltering, and contested. Scratch below the surface, and the relationship between head of state and head of government has been far from settled. The continued existence of an independent prime minister was not a given in the eighteenth century. The continued existence of the monarchy until today has not been a given either. It had been abolished in Britain in 1649, as it was in France in 1792 (and 1848 and 1870), Germany in 1918, and Italy in 1946. It would have been vulnerable in Britain had there been military defeat or successful revolution: its continuation into the future is not assured. Monarchies are going out of fashion. Britain’s has held strong.

In this chapter, we examine the almost uniquely powerful position the British prime minister is in compared to heads of government abroad, and the long list of the PM’s powers and resources. With so much in their favour, why is their performance often so underwhelming? Premierships can go by in a blur of frenzied activity. Prime ministers typically only reflect fully on the powers and resources they possessed after their period in office is over, when they are writing their memoirs, ruefully reflecting on what might have been. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t precise powers, some formal, others informal, accumulated over the years, and it is these that we consider in this chapter. The most successful prime ministers, like Thatcher or Attlee, knew, by study or osmosis, how to use them.

Describes the invention and use of impeachment by the British Parliament from 1376 through the 1780s, with particular focus on its primary purpose as a legislative counterweight to royal oppression and overreach, as well as its role in defining the limits of the British constitution.