During Its First Two Years Or So In Office The Blair Government gave great prominence to its programme of constitutional reform. But more recently its priorities appeared to shift back to more familiar issues. As the election approached social and economic policies were brought to the top of the political agenda, and for the most part opposition parties too have been content to follow suit. All this ref lects the familiar belief that both politicians and most of the electorate in Britain are more interested in ‘bread-and-butter’ issues and the aspirations fuelling them than in constitutional arguments and abstractions. Nor is this view at all surprising. The British constitution is an elusive and ambiguous matter and its history has been one of continuous, often imperceptible, institutional adaptation rather than one marked by periodic formal amendment and revision. As a result the constitution as a whole has usually been taken for granted. It has been assumed to be sound in essentials, though no doubt capable of improvement here and there in response to serious political or social pressures.

Among Arguments Advanced In Favour Of Direct Democracy, legitimacy pleas loom large. If the rules governing people can only be legitimate when those rules arise from and represent the will of all, then it is commonly argued that people should have the right to vote not just for representatives but on substantive issues of public policy as well. To claim otherwise is regarded as anti-democratic: for example, Bogdanor writes that ‘in the final analysis, the arguments against referendums are arguments against democracy’, while Saward asks, ‘What better way to maximize responsiveness of rulers to the ruled than by fostering a system in which the ruled themselves make the decisions?’