A majority in all parties do, I think, want to see local government recover its old vigour and independence.
A simplification of local government then leaves room for representative bodies in the non-English bits of the United Kingdom.
According to Richard Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism chief, Bush was so obsessed with Iraq that he failed to take action against Osama Bin Laden despite repeated warnings from his intelligence experts.
All the research shows that being married, with all its ups and downs, is by far the most effective way of making young men law-abiding and giving them a sense of purpose and self-worth.
America slept because most Americans preferred it that way.
At a rough estimate, I should guess I started taking an interest in the British Constitution at the age of forty-two and a half.
But any reform of the Second Chamber must lead us one stage further back: to a reinvigoration of the Lower House and a determination to make its scrutiny of legislation a reality rather than a wearisome formality.
But more dramatic even than the end to the silence of the monarchy is the revival of the judiciary as a constitutional actor.
Churchill was wrong about India, Margaret Thatcher was wrong about the poll tax.
Defenders of the status quo will argue that this system has served us well over the centuries, that our parliamentary traditions have combined stability and flexibility and that we should not cast away in a minute what has taken generations to build.
For all its terrible faults, in one sense America is still the last, best hope of mankind, because it spells out so vividly the kind of happiness that most people actually want, regardless of what they are told they ought to want.
For the first half of this century, High Court judges have been cautious to the point of timidity in expressing any criticism of governmental action; the independence of the judiciary has been of a decidedly subordinate character.
I cannot help believing that both the poverty and the independence would wither under most systems of Proportional Representation (PR).
I must, in fact, confess to a more general insouciance: I really don't mind very much if there is an occasional dust-up between one part of the political system and another.
I think it's a pity that in many people's minds constitutional reform and PR have come to mean much the same thing.
I think we have too often sacrificed clear and honest argument in the interests of smoothness of administration.
In real terms, there is a greater disparity of earnings between the very rich and the very poor.
It's true that I'm taking a break from writing a regular column to do other things but it's got nothing to do with what dear Simon has or has not written.
More serious, I think, is the way in which attention and influence has imperceptibly drained away from the House.
No constitution is or can be perfectly symmetrical, what it can and must be is generally accepted as both fair and usable.
Nothing wrong with standing alone, but it does help to know where you are standing and I'm not convinced that we do.
Of course great politicians are always liable to be wrong about something, and the more people tell them they are wrong, the more stubbornly they defend their error.
One must not shut oneself off in the family, but rather, grow out of the family shell into the new Socialist Society.
One of the unsung freedoms that go with a free press is the freedom not to read it.
Sexual relations, of course, have existed, exist, and will exist. However, this is in no way connected with the indispensability of the existence of the family.
Something is happening to Britain and the British. Or has happened. We are said to be passing through a transition, or a turning point, or a transformation; nobody is quite sure which.
The Child Support Agency is falling apart. The Sure Start programme is now reported actually to retard the most disadvantaged children.
The president is being denounced for not taking the kind of pre-emptive action in Afghanistan that he has been so passionately denounced for taking in Iraq. Damned if he does and damned if he doesn't.
There is... genuine virtue in the relative poverty of our political parties and the relative independence of their constituency associations.
We are also further than ever from equality of opportunity.
We criticize, copy, patronize, idolize and insult but we never doubt that the U.S. has a unique position in the history of human hopes.
We must not deface our national treasures with razor wire and lumps of concrete.
We want a system that will improve consistency and steadiness in the quality of government.
What the world needs now is more Americans. The U.S. is the first nation on earth deliberately dedicated to letting people choose what they want and giving them a chance to get it.
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