(2) Defining Constitutionalism

We will employ Fred Ridley’s (1988: p. 317) broad definition of a constitution as: ‘...the whole system of government of a country, the collection of rules, written and unwritten, which regulate the government’. Any investigation of the sources of state authority must address two preliminary conundrums. The first of these relates to the ambiguity, which surrounds the explanation of what a constitution actually involves. Britain’s unwritten constitution and its disaggregated system of laws, conventions and principles have tended to obscure the definition of the function and powers of the institutions of the state. Secondly, the British constitution’s ‘unwritten’ or ‘unformalised’ nature, as Neville Johnson (1977) has more

(iv) Separation of Powers - in reality powers are shared but each branch has its own distinctive role and functions in the constitution.

(3) The Established British Constitutional Doctrine: Basic propositions

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