A Dissident's Guide to the Constitution: Episode 5, Part II — A Lawless Lawmaker

“No person who has an office or place of profit under the King, or receives a pension from the Crown, shall be capable of serving as a member of the House of Commons.” So declared the Act of Settlement, a statute of prime UK constitutional significance, just before the Union of England and Scotland; but that sentence of the Act as originally passed has been struck out by a complicated legislative sleight of hand, with much invocation of “modern convention” and “democracy” and lawyerly nods towards Walter Bagehot’s 1860s paradigm of “parliamentary democracy” and Albert Venn Dicey’s 1885 doctrine of “parliamentary sovereignty” as supposedly expressing the “national will”. It was, however, a notion of which Dicey himself repented less than thirty years later as having caused “lawlessness in England”.