"The whole system of Cabinet government is founded not on laws but on practices" - Sir Ivor Jennings. "Cabinet Government".

"The charge made against M.P.s which is probably best founded and most serious, is that they show so little independence...It is surrender of conscience, reason and duty which ought to be intolerable to any member. The coercion of these party rules is a first step in the direction of Fascism and Nazism". - Lord Wedgewood (Labour) "Testament to Democracy" 1942.

"A political system resting on professional party politicians is clearly fatal to all liberty and national well-being. It represents a total destruction of our historic Parliamentary constitution behind whose forms, institutions and ceremonies it has disguised itself whilst at the same time rendering them meaningless. The full meaning of Parliamentary supremacy is now lost to us by the constitutional corruptions which the professional politician has fomented by their appeals to an alien and fraudulent political ideology. By clearly identifying and correcting these corruptions we can recover the enduring qualities of strength and freedom of our Parliamentary constitution for which generations of Englishmen have for centuries been ready to sacrifice their lives and their possessions". -Richard Crossman.(1907 -1974) former Labour Minister, in 1963 introduction to Walter Bagehot's "The English Constitution" 1867

One of the most significant insights into the history of Anglo-American law offered by F. A. Hayek concerns the superiority of common law over statute law in framing a free society. English common law, like much medieval law, Hayek maintained, reflected the underlying notion that law was not so much created as uncovered and that its principles were identical to the fundamental canons of justice upon which all free societies rest. It was this view of law that predominated in England until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when for the first time the European nation-states sought to use legislation to effect specific policies.

As Hayek emphasized in Law, Legislation and Liberty, until the discovery of Aristotle's Politics in the thirteenth century and the reception of Justinian's code in the fifteenth . . . Western Europe passed through an epoch of nearly a thousand years when law was regarded as something given independently of human will, something to be discovered, not made, and when the conception that law could be deliberately made or altered seemed sacrilegious.

The reason why England, unlike the continental countries, did not develop a highly centralized absolute monarchy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was its distinctive system of legal rules and procedures. What prevented such development, Hayek writes, was the deeply entrenched tradition of a common law that was not conceived as the product of anyone's will but rather as a barrier to abuse of power.

Hayek elsewhere writes: This medieval view, which is profoundly important as background for modern developments, though completely accepted perhaps only during the early Middle Ages, was that the state cannot itself create or make law, and of course as little abolish or violate law, because this would mean to abolish justice itself, it would be absurd, a sin, a rebellion against God who alone creates law. For centuries it was recognized doctrine that kings or any other human authority could only declare or find the existing law, or modify abuses that had crept in, and not create law. Only gradually, during the later Middle Ages, did the conception of deliberate creation of new law legislation as we know it came to be accepted. Hayek, Constitution of Liberty, 163.

"Bagehot was quite open in this deception by which the English people were deprived of their great constitutional heritage. He declared that the English monarchy was to do nothing more than to "act as a disguise. It enables our real rulers to change without heedless people knowing it"....and ..."the appendages of the monarchy have been converted into the essence of a republic, only here.....it is needful to keep the ancient show while we secretly interpolate the new reality". - "The Restoration of the English Constitution", Ben Greene.