The Wacky Legacies of British Constitutional History

The United States, with its rational federal constitution and normally-rational state constitutions, is a poor place in which to learn about comparative politics, because we assume the habits of rationalism, tempered by sentiment, apply everywhere. We are equally confused by the speed with which the French cycle through their regimes and the gradual accretion of powers that mark the British constitution. I am far from being able to offer an expert opinion on any matter of British constitutional history, but I would like to point to a few Wikipedia articles that may amuse and interest readers of ITA.
It is true that the American constitution is not quite as rational as it is presented. Whether one accepts the idea of a ‘living constitution’ as valid or not, it is clear that the constitution as practised does change from generation to generation, and that sometimes these changes are improvised; the status, say, of lands conquered, purchased or acquired in North America, Asia, the South Pacific and the Caribbean shows this pretty well. Nor is constitution-making by legislative or plebiscitary means always rational: The existence of the Alabama constitution by itself denies that. And American constitutional history also throws up delightful oddities like the Dorr Rebellion, the only time in history the ‘republican government’ clause of the U.S. federal constitution has ever been seriously tested.
But these are nothing compared to the remarkable sophistries and puzzlements of British constitutional history. Consider Newfoundland and Labrador, now the tenth province of Canada, but only a part of Canada since 1949. Before that, it had been a Dominion (a self-governing part of the British Empire), and a colony–but not a part of the Canadian Dominion. (Canada’s own political history is at once frightfully complex and dull, like so many things involving our neighbor to the north.) In the antipodes, Australia’s Northern Territory actually rejected statehood, after only a hundred years or so of federation without federal representation.
But Britain did not export the best of its weird constitutional practices to the colonies. It kept them for domestic consumption. Thus the counties palatine retained substantial autonomy until the nineteenth century. And Cornwall may have a Parliament that time forgot: It is a live dispute whether the abolition of the Stannary Parliament in the late nineteenth century was legal or not.
Arguably falling under the status of ‘domestic’ oddities is the Isle of Man, which lies smack dab in the center of the Irish Sea, or, rather, equidistant from England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland–the four major parts of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. (”Britain” and “U.K.” are not, therefore, synonymous.) But the Isle of Man isn’t a part of the U.K., though its defence and foreign policy is managed by London, and though it is ultimately governed by the Crown. The I.o.M. is, instead, neither a member of the U.K. nor of the EU, and its government is dominated by the Tynwald parliament, and especially the Lower House, the House of Keys.
Understanding these facts makes it possible to understand why Winston Churchill would say to Parliament in 1940 that “President Roosevelt has recently made it clear that he would like to discuss with us [i.e., the U.K. government], and with the Dominion of Canada and with Newfoundland, the development of American naval and air facilities in Newfoundland and in the West Indies.” It also helps one grasp the immense gulf separating British statesmen like Edmund Burke and the uber-rationalists of the French Revolution….