The New Old World: The Treaty on the Commonwealth Constitution
Jacinda Ardern was a curious figure: following a meteoric rise that had seen her appointed to Minister of Finance in Sandra Lee-Vercoe’s administration in 2014 she had been unanimously chosen as the new Prime Minister following Lee-Vercoe’s resignation two years later. However, New Zealand politics always seemed too small for her and few were surprised when she announced in 2023 that she would be departing Premier House in order to stand as the Speaker-designate of the Commonwealth Socialist grouping, even if there was some grumbling from those who regarded her departing in the middle of her tenure as ‘bad form.’
Ardern’s tenure as Speaker was, almost immediately, dominated by constitutional questions, most notably those triggered by the secession of West Canada and Westralia. Like the vast majority of her country’s political elite for over a century, Ardern was a keen defender of the Commonwealth as an institution, understanding its ability to protect its smaller members and allow them to ‘punch above their weight’ on the international stage. To this end, she had been key in taking a conciliatory approach towards the secessionist Canadian provinces, working to persuade the Ottawa government of the need to take a soft line. As a result, West Canada smoothly became a Commonwealth member.
However, this conciliatory line was later held to have been one of the key factors behind the resurgence of Western Australian secessionism that resulted in the successful Westralia independence referendum in 2027. In a straw that broke the camel’s back sense, this second referendum caused concern in many Commonwealth capitals. While few in Westminster or Karachi were actively worried about the possibility of the Celtic Fringe or Kashmir going wholly their own way (indeed, few in the Alliance Party or the Kashmiri Nationalist Party were active republicans), the Speaker’s office’s relaxed attitude towards the West Canada and Westralia referendums caused concern. A Balkanised Commonwealth, the belief ran, would make the intergovernmental cooperation upon which the organisation had heretofore been run impossible and leave it open to fracture and collapse through indecision.
However, relaxed is exactly not what the Speaker’s office was over all of this. They recognised that a combination of economic stagnation and the scandal-ridden collapse of establishment parties in countries as varied as East Africa, the Pacific Islands and, most crucially, Pakistan and the UK had created an opportunity to engage in thoroughgoing constitutional reform, meaningful progress on which had otherwise been stagnant for decades. At the prime ministers’ conference immediately following the Westralia referendum, Ardern delivered a speech reaffirming the Commonwealth’s commitment to improving democracy, transparency, cooperation and, crucially, efficiency between the member states. It was an innocuous enough speech in many ways but few, in this context, could miss the implication of her words.
The 2028 conference reached agreement on a 16-page mandate for an intra-Commonwealth committee which would be responsible for drafting the first set of proposals for far-reaching reform of Commonwealth governance. By the end of the year, the name Treaty on the Commonwealth Constitution (“TCC”) had been decided upon but it was only over the course of 2029 that it would become clear that this new agreement would necessitate the replacement of the member states by a single Commonwealth country. Although, for many practical purposes, the Commonwealth member states had acted on the world stage as if they were a single country, the fact was that many of the member states, such as the West Indies, Rhodesia or Ceylon, had developed a great deal of national pride and there was an instinctive recoiling in many countries from what this would mean.
Nevertheless, the first draft of the TCC was presented to an autumn conference of prime ministers in 2029. This conference allayed the fears of certain prime ministers by changing the proposed unicameral legislature to a bicameral one, with a lower house (called the Assembly) composed of members elected via STV in proportion to the population of the member states and an upper house (called the Senate) of five members from each member state. The proposed governmental structure combined elements of British devolution, federalism in Canada and Australia and the compromises of both federal US constitutions. Each member state would retain a broad series of competencies over education and their own legal systems, while the new Commonwealth Parliament would absorb most powers of the former national governments, notably most powers of taxation. Although it was only very briefly a point of discussion, it was confirmed that the monarchy would remain with the same level of powers as it had commonly exercised in the member states over the previous century (i.e. virtually none). The only important (by a given definition of important, of course) change would be that the monarch’s official title would change to ‘King/Queen of the Commonwealth.’
The two most important changes, however, attempted to deal with concerns related to economic stagnation and political distrust. On the topic of political mistrust, the TCC proposed the handing back of various powers from the government to citizens in the form of direct democracy rules. The TCC provided for groups of citizens to make a request to change the law. If the initial request received enough support (initially set at 4.5 million pledged supporters but subject to periodic review), then the request would be put to a Commonwealth-wide referendum three years later. During that time, any number of the original pledged supporters may withdraw their support, in theory preventing short-term political passions from dominating the referendum topics. All parties would then have the opportunity to issue formal opinions on the referendum in question. Perhaps as a response to the shoddy drafting the referendum question in West Canada, the TCC provided that the referendum would only join the Commonwealth statute-book if it received a ‘yes’ vote in all of the member states.
On the economic front, the TCC proposed a change to the way that the economic health of the country would be calculated, formally enshrining the Gross National Happiness Index as the main metric of success, with economic budgets focused on GDP to be replaced by annual well-being budgets. (The Bank of England, which would be the central bank of the Commonwealth, would keep on counting GDP, of course.) These budgets, and the government as a whole, would then be measured by four priorities that would be enshrined in the constitution: improving mental and physical health; reducing poverty; addressing inequality; and improving environmental sustainability. Of course, none of these were exactly unrelated to economics but the shift was still considered to be an enormous game-changer, at least in tone.
With the compromise TCC being signed as a Commonwealth Act in December 2029, all the member states were then required to pass legislation formally passing it into their law. The Commonwealth therefore formed a committee to try to ‘sell’ the agreement to the public and put pressure on what remaining national governments there were with cold feet. Drawn from across the political spectrum, the three key figures were drawn from the Commonwealth’s centre-left (Ardern herself), the centre (Rory Stewart) and the centre-right (Brian Lara, the Conservative home secretary of the West Indies). The biggest opposition came from governments in Canberra and Ottawa, who were concerned that the move to turn the Commonwealth into a single federal country would lead to the breakup of their own federations. The skepticism of two of the Big Four would, at one time, have been the immediate death knell of any major Commonwealth reforms: the fact that it wasn’t now was, in many ways, a testament to the Commonwealth’s development.
In May 2029, the Australian government of Malarndirri McCarthy, an opponent of federalisation, called a referendum on the proposed constitution. At first this threatened to derail the whole project, with certain polls in the final month of the referendum showing a ‘No’ vote ahead, as the anti-TCC campaign attempted to re-frame the document as meaning the return of direct rule from London. However, after hard campaigning by Ardern, Stewart and Lara in the country, the Australian people backed the constitution by a margin of 55% to 45% on a turnout of 92%. With that, serious organised opposition to the TCC dissipated and the way was cleared for its passing
In the UK specifically, Stewart and his government of national unity had taken up the cause of the TCC with vim, largely as a substitute for a transformative domestic agenda. The economy continued to chugg on much as it had done under Cooper, meaning that the switch to the National Happiness Index was an attractive way for the country to get out of its present sticking point. On the constitutional front, the widespread public disgust with all of the main parties as a result of the Leveson and Car Wash inquiries meant that a transition to multi-continental federalism mixed with direct democracy looked like a convenient way to escape this bind. (Curiously, Stewart himself, although technically a Liberal MP, had managed to carve an almost apolitical profile for himself, doubtless helped by his prior fame due to his actions in the African War.) Furthermore, many members of the Alliance within the coalition saw federalism as a crucial step towards the dissolution of the United Kingdom itself, albeit that Liberal, Progressive and Co-operative politicians tended to play down or otherwise elide this possibility.
Opposition to the TCC within the UK came from certain factions within the Conservatives (who were old-school romantics), the Libertarians (who wanted to embark on a deregulation programme probably impossible under a multi-continental federation) and Labour (who toyed with using it as a wedge issue against the government). Ultimately, however, none of these parties ever really attempted to mobilise anti-TCC thinking as official party policy, for two key reasons. Firstly, moving to a full federation was widely regarded, both by politicians and the public, as a good answer to the country’s economic and political malaise. Secondly, the UK had always been at the heart of the Commonwealth and the vast majority of the British public thought very fondly of the institution and the TCC, as the harbinger of ‘more Commonwealth’, commanded wide public support. In any event, as the day of the adoption of the TCC approached, party loyalties completely broke down as individual MPs crossed the floor, sometimes more than once, in order to sit themselves in the appropriate grouping for the new Commonwealth-wide parties that were appearing (the details of these parties will be covered later). Opposition thus never cohered into a single campaign.
As such, the winter of 2030 was both a sorrowful and a joyful one, as the final session of the Westminster Parliament as a national parliament drafted and debated the act that would acceed the country to the TCC. Symbolically, King George VII and his various governors general around the Commonwealth gave royal assent to the bills simultaneously on 1 January 2031. And, just like that, something of the old world had passed.
List of Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
- William Pitt; Tory; January - March 1801
- Henry Addington; Tory; March 1801 - May 1804
- William Pitt; Tory; May 1804 - January 1806
- Baron Grenville; Whig; February 1806 - March 1807
- Duke of Portland; Tory; March 1807 - October 1809
- Spencer Perceval; Tory; October 1809 - May 1812
- Earl of Liverpool; Tory; June 1812 - April 1827
- George Canning; Canningite Tory; April - August 1827
- Viscount Goderich; Canningite Tory; August 1827 - January 1828
- Duke of Wellington; Ultra-Tory; January 1828 - November 1830
- Earl Grey; Whig; November 1830 - July 1834
- Viscount Melbourne; Whig; July - November 1834
- Duke of Wellington; Ultra-Tory; November - December 1834
- Sir Robert Peel; Conservative; December 1834 - April 1835
- Viscount Melbourne; Whig; April 1835 - August 1841
- Sir Robert Peel; Conservative; August 1841 - June 1846
- Lord John Russell; Whig; June 1846 - February 1852
- Earl of Derby; Conservative; February - December 1852
- Earl of Aberdeen; Conservative; December 1852 - January 1855
- Viscount Palmerston; Whig; January 1855 - February 1858
- Earl of Derby; Conservative; February 1858 - June 1859
- Viscount Palmerston; Whig; June 1859 - October 1865
- Earl Russell; Whig; October 1865 - June 1866
- Earl of Derby; Conservative; June 1866 - February 1868
- Benjamin Disraeli; Conservative; February - December 1868
- William Gladstone; Liberal; December 1868 - February 1874
- Benjamin Disraeli; Conservative; February 1874 - April 1880
- Marquess of Hartington; Liberal; April 1880 - July 1888
- William Harcourt; Liberal; July - August 1888
- Joseph Chamberlain; Liberal; August 1888 - August 1895
- Lord Randolph Churchill; Conservative; August 1895 - February 1905
- Joseph Chamberlain; Liberal; February 1905 - July 1906
- Sir Charles Dilke; Liberal; July 1906 - January 1911
- David Lloyd George; Liberal; January 1911 - November 1921
- Lord Hugh Cecil; Conservative; November 1921 - October 1924
- Sir Austen Chamberlain; Liberal; October 1924 - May 1929
- Ramsay MacDonald; Labour; May 1929 - October 1930
- Ramsay MacDonald; National Labour ‘Grand Coalition’; October 1930 - November 1934
- David Lloyd George; Liberal; November 1934 - June 1940
- Winston Churchill; Country ‘Wartime Coalition’; June 1940 - November 1945
- Clement Attlee; Labour; November 1945 - November 1955
- Hugh Gaitskell; Labour; November 1955 - January 1963
- George Brown; Labour; January - February 1963
- Barbara Castle; Labour; February 1963 - June 1976
- Margaret Thatcher; Liberal; June 1976 - May 1981
- William Rodgers; Labour; May 1981 - February 1991
- David Steel; Liberal; February 1991 - March 1996
- Margaret Beckett; Labour; March 1996 - June 2005
- Bertie Ahern; Liberal; June 2005 - June 2011
- Nick Clegg; Liberal; June 2011 - July 2014
- Yvette Cooper; Labour; July 2014 - December 2024
- Douglas Alexander; Labour; December 2024 - July 2025
- Ed Miliband; Labour; July 2025 - July 2026
- Rory Stewart; Liberal; July 2026 - January 2031