All that I will say to the hon. Gentleman is that that did not work very well in Clacton.
The United Kingdom has undergone nearly two decades of constitutional change. The Leader of the House mentioned the most recent changes: the Scotland Act 2012 and the Wales Bill, which is currently before the other place. Vernon Bogdanor, the Prime Minister’s former tutor, described Labour’s recent 13 years in government as
“an era of constitutional reform comparable to that of the years of the Great Reform Act of 1832”
or the Parliament Act 1911. That era included the establishment of a Scottish Parliament, a Welsh Assembly, a Northern Ireland Assembly and a London Mayor and assembly, and of proportional representation in elections to all those bodies and in European elections. It included House of Lords reform and the ejection of all but 92 of the hereditary peers, the introduction of people’s peers and an elected Speaker, and the introduction of the country’s first-ever legislation requiring political parties to publish lists of their donors. We established an independent electoral commission. We introduced the
Human Rights Act 1998 and the Freedom of Information Act 2000, which gave the public a legal right to gain access to Government information, and we established the separation of powers through the creation of the Supreme Court.