, Columnist
Britain Can’t Fix Brexit Until It Drafts a Constitution
First things first.
Write it down.
Photographer: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images Europe
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Democracy, Winston Churchill once famously said, was the worst way to run a country “apart from all the others that have ever been tried.” Unfortunately, he did not make clear what kind of democracy he favored.
Britain’s dreadful Brexit impasse has divided the country into roughly equal camps, both convinced democracy has been traduced. And they both have a point. What started as an argument over the European Union’s democratic deficit, and the way in which it encroached on Britain’s unwritten constitution, has degenerated into something more fundamental: an argument about the nature of democracy itself in the U.K.