The Kingfisher's Wings

In The Kingfisher's Wings contemporary historians Peter Hennessy and Andrew Blick trace the constitutional developments and tensions that have beset and shaken the UK in the decade since the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. They have been years, as Wilde's Lady Bracknell's might have said, 'crowded with incident.' And these incidents have tended to be disrupters rather than bringers of stability at a time of considerable political uncertainty and upheaval. In the second part of this short, engaging study, the authors discuss what is foreseeable about the near- and medium-term future, before proposing an array of improvements and modifications that might preserve and enhance the nature of the British constitution. Hennessy and Blick believe that breaking the current cycle of decline before it plunges us into an even more dangerous politics of fatalism (which is one stage short of a politics of despair) is a first order question for the United Kingdom of the mid-2020s. Whoever occupies No.10 Downing Street after the forthcoming General Election will face a range of constitutional challenges and opportunities. The authors offer a briefing on what will lie before them, and how they might respond to it.