Page 109 - DPOL202_COMPARATIVE_POLITICS_AND_GOVERNMENT_ENGLISH

Comparative Politics and Government

Notes conventions is that although their validity cannot be a subject of controversy in a court of law,
they cover some of the most important parts of the British governmental system and are most
scrupulously observed. For instance, the entire apparatus of the Cabinet and its relationship
with the Crown and the Parliament have no foundation in law, they are regulated by the
usages and conventions of the constitution which have developed in the course of time.
6. Standard Works: Commentaries on the English constitution written by eminent figures are
also important in as much as they have systematised the diverse written and unwritten rules,
established an understandable relationship between one rule of the constitution and the other,
and then linked them into some degrees of unity by reference to central principles of the
fundamental law of the land. In certain cases, such writers have provided compendious and
detailed accounts of the operation of particular categories of rule and their works have acquired
the status of constitutional documents. Erskine May’s Treatise on the Law, Privileges, Proceedings
and Usages of Parliament, A.V. Dicey’s An Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution,
Anson’s Law and Custom of the Constitution, Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution, Jennings’
Cabinet Government, Laski’s Parliamentary Government in England and Constitutional Law by Wade
and Phillips are some of the most celebrated works on the English constitution.
It is thus evident that the British constitution is a living organism which has been in a condition
of perpetual growth and change. However, it should be remembered that since the English
people are conservative by nature, their political institutions have seldom witnessed a radical
change, though they have a process of incessant evolution. That is why, it is said that in the
history of British constitutional development no revolution was thoroughly radical and that
while the present has remained connected with the past, the future is bound to remain organically
connected with the present. The fact remains that while the British people are conservative by
nature, they are also realistic in their outlook. As a result, the British constitutional system has
been remarkably dynamic and constantly growing in response to the changing conditions of
the age. For example, what was once an absolute monarchy, has gradually been transformed
into a political democracy. The great British empire of Disraeli and Chamberlain has now
become a Commonwealth or an association of free and sovereign nations. It has given strength
to the national pride that in less fortune countries, such changes “take place to the
accompaniment of protracted bloodshed and in the awful shadow of civil war. In Britain, they
are announced in a Speech from the Throne.”
Constitutional Conventions
Conventions of the constitution, a term popularised by Dicey, mean practices and usages hardened
into unwritten rules of political behaviour. That is why, John Stuart Mill has called them ‘unwritten
maxims of the constitution’ and Anson designated them as ‘customs of the constitution’. They
constitute an extra-legal phenomenon in as much as they do not find their place in the written
rules adopted by a legislative or a judicial body. In other words, conventions mean ‘constitutional
practices’, as Prime Minister Asquith said in the House of Commons in 1910, and they rest upon
the usages developed over a long period of history. Hence, conventions of the constitution “are
rules, or unwritten principles, understandings or maxims, of political behaviour. They are not
established in statutes or judicial decisions or parliamentary custom, but they are created outside
of these to regulate political conduct that the statutes etc. have not embodied and may never
embody.”
It follows that there is a technical point of difference between a law and a convention. While a law
is made by legislative body, convention means a practice based on general acquiescence. Again,
while law is precise because of being written into the shape of a document, convention is ‘uncertain’
as it is never formulated into words. Finally, while a law is enforced by the courts, judges can not
enforce a custom as it does not emanate from a legally constituted body. Apart from these technical
point of difference between the two, the peculiar notion about the conventions in Britain is that no
definite boundary line can be drawn between the two in as much as theirs is a fusion without any
confusion. The law of the land pays recognition to the well-established conventions of the times
and once their existence is recognised by legislations, conventions do not remain really very

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