I view a constitution as a set of broad goals, written in such a way as not to be prescriptive as to how to achieve this. In this they are rather like company policies. "Our company has a policy to obey all laws". "Our company has a policy to ensure equality of opportunity regardless of gender, nationality, racial origin or sexual orientation". Etc. It is then the job of the legislature to assemble a more prescriptive means of doing this, just as it is the job of managers in companies to work out how to "maximise profitability and investor return" while still "obeying all laws" and all the rest.The lesson from Ireland would be to confine the Constitution to basic rights of citizens and principles of law, the separation of powers and the operation of the democracy - and leave it at that. The most contentiously amended parts of the Irish constitution have dealt with social matters, which IMO had no place in the fundamental law of any country.
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A constitution does well to be proscriptive rather the prescriptive, setting bounds beyond which the regular legislature may not go.I view a constitution as a set of broad goals, written in such a way as not to be prescriptive as to how to achieve this.
I take the point, though I defend my suggestion for reasons Joe Hutch mentioned:That's the big problem: how one decides which religion is "important" for injecting morality into the public debate. <snip>
It's just a bad idea. Plus, once you say morality is the reason, there are many secular charitable organisations in the UK that could be appointed too.
Actually the bishops in the House of Lords were often clashing with Thatcher over various issues.
I think the CofE is a bit more robust than wish-washy nowadays, though that was probably not an unfair characterisation of Runcie’s tenure.Well, yeah, but from the 1960s onwards the CofE has been seen as full of wishy-washy do-gooders. Certainly most CofE bishops were dead set against Thatcher-style Toryism.