Home / The English constitution / Does the UK have a constitution?
Key question
Yes, but not in one document. Here is what that means, and why it sits at the centre of the argument on this site.
The UK does have a constitution, but it is uncodified, which means it is not written down in a single document. Most democracies have one master text you can hold in your hand. Britain's rules are spread across many places, and most of them can be changed like any other law.
It rests on four main sources. Acts of Parliament, from the surviving clauses of Magna Carta to the Human Rights Act. The common law built up by judges over centuries. Constitutional conventions, the unwritten rules that everyone follows without a statute forcing them. And the works of authority written by figures like Dicey and Bagehot, whose account of the constitution is set out on the English constitution page.
The common shorthand is unwritten, but that is misleading. Most of the constitution is written down, in thousands of pages of statute and case law. What it lacks is codification, a single higher-law document that sits above ordinary legislation and is harder to change.
Because nothing is entrenched, a simple majority in Parliament can change the constitution itself. That is how the settlement after 1997 was built, and it is why it could in principle be reversed. This flexibility is the whole battleground of the Starkey Thesis, and it is the difference between the political constitution and the legal constitution.
It is best described as uncodified. Most of it is written down across statutes and case law, but there is no single document called the constitution.
Yes. Because nothing is entrenched, Parliament can change constitutional rules by an ordinary Act, with a simple majority.
Very few. The United Kingdom, New Zealand and Israel are the usual examples of democracies without a single codified constitutional document.
