Britain’s Constitution and the Teddy Bear Problem

By Matthew Parish

Saturday 26 September 2026

There is something strangely appropriate about imagining Prime Minister’s Questions conducted before a House of Commons populated entirely by teddy bears. The bears would sit obediently on the green benches. They would occasionally growl when instructed by the Whips, wave their paws at the appropriate moment and display precisely the degree of independence expected of the modern parliamentary backbencher. The Speaker, himself a particularly magnificent teddy bear, would call for order. Ministers would answer questions they had not quite been asked. Opposition members would make noises of outrage. Then everybody would go home, secure in the knowledge that another Wednesday lunchtime had been devoted to the appearance of constitutional accountability.

The solitary human being in our accompanying picture is Andy Burnham. The conceit has acquired an additional contemporary resonance because Burnham, now Prime Minister, has himself recently spoken about the case for a written constitution and “a new clear set of principles about how this country should be run”. The House of Commons Library observed in September 2026 that Britain still has no codified constitution and surveyed precisely the arguments now emerging over whether that peculiar historical arrangement remains adequate. The teddy bears, therefore, are not merely decorative. They pose a serious question beneath the absurdity: what exactly is Parliament supposed to do, and is the machinery of British constitutional democracy still capable of doing it?

Britain has spent centuries congratulating herself upon not having a constitution in the conventional sense. More precisely, she possesses a constitution scattered amongst statutes, judicial decisions, conventions, prerogative powers and institutional habits rather than consolidated in a single superior constitutional instrument. Parliament itself describes the constitution as “partly written and wholly uncodified”. At its centre remains parliamentary sovereignty: Parliament is the supreme legal authority and may enact or repeal any law, while ordinarily no court may set aside an Act of Parliament.

For much of British history this arrangement possessed considerable virtues. It was flexible, evolutionary and resistant to the illusion that political problems could always be solved by drafting another paragraph of constitutional text. Britain escaped many of the revolutionary ruptures suffered by continental Europe precisely because her institutions could bend without formally breaking. Governments fell, monarchs surrendered powers, the franchise expanded and new institutions emerged without anybody having to proclaim a Second, Third or Fourth Republic.

The difficulty is that flexibility depends upon restraint. An uncodified constitution works particularly well when political actors agree that there are things they could legally do but nevertheless ought not to do. Constitutional conventions are powerful only where embarrassment, reputation and institutional loyalty remain powerful. Once politics becomes increasingly professionalised, centralised and adversarial, an uncomfortable question arises: what happens when the gentlemen’s agreement runs out of gentlemen?

The elected dictatorship problem

The central paradox of British democracy is that Parliament is theoretically extraordinarily powerful while individual parliamentarians may in practice be remarkably weak. A government commanding a dependable Commons majority can normally control much of the legislative timetable and rely upon party discipline to secure its principal measures. The constitutional doctrine says that Parliament governs. Political reality frequently means that the executive governs through Parliament.

This distinction matters. The Commons is supposed simultaneously to sustain a government and scrutinise it. Yet ministers generally belong to the majority controlling the institution intended to scrutinise them. Backbench rebellions certainly occur, select committees can be formidable and the House of Lords can force reconsideration. Nevertheless, the fundamental architecture contains an unavoidable tension between legislative independence and executive stability.

Hence the teddy bears. A teddy bear is the ideal parliamentary loyalist. It has impeccable attendance, causes no scandals and never unexpectedly votes against the Whip. It will remain exactly where the Chief Whip puts it until somebody moves it somewhere else.

The joke becomes less amusing when one considers how much constitutional authority may be concentrated in a government enjoying a substantial parliamentary majority. Because ordinary Acts of Parliament are not generally subordinate to a superior codified constitutional law, the British system does not reproduce the kind of constitutional hierarchy familiar from many other democracies. Parliamentary sovereignty remains the foundational doctrine, even after devolution, the Human Rights Act and the creation of the Supreme Court changed the constitutional landscape.

That does not mean Britain is undemocratic or lawless. Far from it. Her courts are independent, elections are competitive, governments change peacefully and public administration operates overwhelmingly according to law. The Electoral Commission concluded that the 2024 general election was well run and that most people continued to have confidence in the administration of elections, although it also identified areas requiring improvement. The problem is subtler. Institutions can continue functioning competently while their underlying constitutional relationships become increasingly difficult to explain or defend.

Votes, seats and legitimacy

Then there is the electoral system. Members of the House of Commons continue to be elected by First Past the Post: each constituency returns the candidate receiving the largest number of votes. The virtues of this arrangement are familiar. It is comprehensible, preserves a geographical relationship between an MP and a constituency and has historically facilitated governments capable of governing without elaborate coalition negotiations.

Its critics point to the corresponding disadvantage: the national distribution of Commons seats need not closely resemble the national distribution of votes. Votes cast for losing candidates do not contribute towards representation elsewhere and large concentrations of support may produce very different parliamentary consequences from the same number of votes distributed efficiently between constituencies.

This is not merely an argument about proportional representation. It raises the deeper question of what an MP is supposed to represent. Is Parliament a gathering of 650 territorial representatives, or should its composition approximate the political preferences of the national electorate? Those principles are not identical, and electoral reform requires choosing how they should be reconciled rather than pretending there is a mathematically perfect democratic system.

Britain might therefore consider a mixed electoral system retaining constituency MPs while adding a compensatory element to reduce extreme discrepancies between aggregate votes and seats. There are reasonable arguments against such a change: proportional systems can weaken constituency links, empower party organisations through lists and make coalition bargaining more important. Constitutional reform deserves more seriousness than the assumption that changing the voting formula automatically produces better politicians.

What is the second chamber for?

The House of Lords presents an even stranger constitutional puzzle. Britain has finally completed another stage of the extraordinarily prolonged retreat from hereditary legislative membership. The House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Act 2026 received Royal Assent on 18 March and removes the remaining exception that permitted hereditary peers to sit by virtue of hereditary status. That is a substantial historical change, but it does not answer the larger question of what the second chamber should ultimately become.

An entirely elected upper house sounds democratically obvious until one asks what happens when it disagrees with the Commons. If both chambers possess democratic mandates, why should one invariably prevail? Conversely, if the second chamber remains principally appointed, on what democratic basis should appointed legislators obstruct decisions taken by elected representatives?

A redesigned second chamber might instead represent the nations, regions and great metropolitan areas of the United Kingdom. That would give it a constitutional purpose distinct from duplicating the Commons. England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have developed profoundly asymmetrical political arrangements, while English regional government has evolved through mayors and combined authorities without anything resembling a comprehensive federal settlement. A territorial chamber could turn this collection of historical improvisations into something approaching a constitutional structure.

The alternative is to continue renovating the Lords one room at a time for another century.

Government by convention

The most fundamental reform would be codification itself. Britain need not import the United States Constitution, complete with eighteenth-century language and two centuries of judicial warfare over commas. Nor need she abandon parliamentary government, the monarchy or the flexibility that has traditionally distinguished her constitutional order.

A British written constitution could begin more modestly by identifying which principles are genuinely fundamental: the composition and authority of Parliament; the appointment and removal of governments; the independence of the judiciary; the constitutional position of the Crown; the powers of devolved governments; the circumstances in which emergency powers may be exercised; basic political rights; the status of local government and the procedures by which constitutional rules themselves may be amended.

That last question is particularly important. If every constitutional provision could be amended tomorrow by an ordinary parliamentary majority, codification would change considerably less than its advocates imagine. Yet entrenchment would alter the traditional doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty. Constitutional lawyers have long disagreed about whether requirements such as supermajorities or referendums can comfortably coexist with the orthodox understanding that Parliament cannot bind its successors.

This is therefore not administrative tidying. It would amount to reconsidering where sovereignty ultimately resides.

The traditional British answer is Parliament. The democratic answer might increasingly be formulated as the people, whose authority Parliament exercises under constitutional conditions. That transition would be intellectually profound. Parliament would cease to be legally omnipotent and become instead an institution whose powers derive from, and are limited by, a constitutional settlement possessing authority beyond the transient majority of the day.

There are powerful objections. Judicial enforcement of constitutional rights inevitably transfers some disputed questions from elected politicians to judges. Entrenched constitutions can preserve yesterday’s compromises after society has changed. Constitutional courts themselves become political battlegrounds. Britain’s adaptable arrangements have repeatedly survived crises that more rigid constitutional systems might have struggled to absorb.

Those objections deserve to be part of any constitutional convention rather than dismissed as antiquated resistance to reform.

The missing institution: local democracy

There is another British constitutional peculiarity that Westminster discussions habitually neglect: extraordinary centralisation. Britain has experimented enthusiastically with devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, and more unevenly with English mayors and combined authorities, while retaining a political culture in which Westminster is expected to have an opinion upon virtually everything.

A serious constitutional settlement would therefore have to address not merely relations between Westminster and Edinburgh, Cardiff or Belfast, but between central government and ordinary local government. Municipal authority should not exist simply because Parliament has temporarily decided that it may. Cities and regions require constitutionally comprehensible spheres of responsibility, accompanied by the fiscal powers necessary to discharge them.

That would also change Westminster itself. A Parliament that does fewer things may perform its remaining responsibilities better. MPs need not function simultaneously as national legislators, ombudsmen for every administrative malfunction in their constituencies, party campaigners, television personalities and intermediaries between citizens and a bewildering central bureaucracy.

Britain’s constitutional difficulty may ultimately be not that she has too little government, but that too much political authority converges upon one small district of central London.

The teddy bear test

This brings us back to our ursine Parliament.

Imagine replacing every MP except the Prime Minister with a teddy bear. What constitutional functions would immediately cease to operate? Genuine legislative scrutiny presumably would. Independent political judgement would disappear. Ministers would encounter considerably fewer awkward rebellions. Constituency representation would deteriorate, although exceptionally diligent bears might still manage ceremonial openings and agricultural shows. Prime Minister’s Questions might become quieter.

Yet much of the visible theatre could continue. The bears could occupy the benches. Recorded growling could reproduce the appropriate atmosphere. Party managers could arrange them into voting lobbies. The Speaker Bear could shout “Order!” and everybody watching television could enjoy the reassuring appearance of parliamentary government.

The absurdity exposes the point. Democratic institutions cannot be justified merely because their ceremonies continue. Their legitimacy depends upon whether they distribute political power effectively, constrain those who exercise it and permit citizens meaningfully to remove, replace and scrutinise their governors.

Britain does not require constitutional revolution merely because her institutions are old. Age is not a defect. Nor does every eccentricity require rationalisation: a country that abolished everything inexplicable about Britain would eventually abolish Britain.

But there is a distinction between eccentricity and ambiguity about power. The Crown, Commons, Lords, courts, devolved administrations, local authorities, civil service and electorate now inhabit a constitutional structure assembled during different historical periods according to different principles. Parliamentary sovereignty belongs intellectually to one age, mass democracy to another, judicially protected rights to another and devolution to yet another. Each new layer has been placed carefully upon the previous one without anybody entirely rebuilding the foundations.

A constitutional convention could begin that rebuilding without prejudging every answer. It could examine electoral representation, the second chamber, devolution, local autonomy, executive powers, constitutional rights and the circumstances in which fundamental rules may be altered. Its purpose should not be to manufacture a predetermined constitution but to make explicit choices that British history has too often allowed governments to avoid.

The resulting settlement might retain considerably more of the existing system than radical reformers expect. The monarchy could remain. Parliamentary government could remain. Constituency MPs could remain. Much of the common law constitution could survive.

Tradition and constitutional clarity are not necessarily enemies.

What ought to disappear is the assumption that longevity itself supplies legitimacy, or that conventions developed under dramatically different political conditions must remain sufficient indefinitely.

And if Britain cannot bring herself to have that discussion, there remains the alternative illustrated in our picture. Fill the green benches with teddy bears. They will be inexpensive, impeccably behaved and surprisingly resistant to lobbying. They will never leak Cabinet papers, challenge the Whips or appear on television to announce a leadership bid.

The alarming thing is not that teddy-bear government would be absurd. It is that, during some parliamentary afternoons, nobody watching from the gallery might immediately notice the difference.