... like to bring reference to Thomas Paine when he said "A constitution is a thing antecedent to a government, and a government is only a creature of a constitution."1 In my opinion, this implies that a constitution must exist prior to the government it regulates and cannot be created by the government, because the government is a creation of the constitution. If this theory is accurate, we are now presented with the predicament of whether we can have a constitution without the total collapse of our political and legal system or whether we are destined to be without a written constitution for so long as parliament stands. Obviously, the question of whether or not we in the United Kingdom have a constitution depends wholly on the definition of a constitution. A constitution in the historic sense of the word represented the integral system of a government which depicted the manner ...

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