LONDON -- At the speed of an express train, a formidable new dilemma is hurtling toward the British government: how to respond to the prospect of a written constitution that the leaders of the European Union are determined to have. Drafts are already being circulated and will be finalized in the next few months.
Britain, remember, has never had a written constitution throughout its history. Nor did England have one before the union with Scotland in 1707. The nearest thing it has had to a written constitutional document is the Magna Carta of 1215, which secured the rights of the more powerful barons against royal absolutism. Otherwise it has relied through the centuries on a process of "broadening down from precedent to precedent" -- in the words of the famous Victorian poet Lord Tennyson.
Unlike Germany or Japan in 1945, the United States after its war of independence, or France and Russia after their revolutions, Britain never felt the need to make a fresh beginning and write down how individual rights should be protected against the state or how the powers of government should be delimited.