Burnham says Britain needs a written constitution - the argument he is not making

Andy Burnham, the Mayor of Greater Manchester, argues that Britain should adopt a written constitution, telling GB News the current settlement "disempowers" people. The Guardian and Independent report his case follows new devolution plans; Burnham frames the lack of codified rules as leaving power too easily centralised and citizens without clear entitlements they can point to in law.

The argument for a written constitution usually rests on clarity and citizen empowerment - if your rights and the state's limits are in a single document, you know where you stand. The argument against it - which Burnham does not address - is that Britain's constitution works precisely because it is not written down. It bends without breaking. A written constitution is also only as good as the people interpreting it, and interpretation is a political act dressed as a legal one. America has a written constitution and a Supreme Court that rewrites it every generation; the words stay still while the meaning drifts.

The unwritten constitution survived civil war, empire, two world wars and the loss of empire without collapsing into tyranny or paralysis. Its virtue is that it does not lie about what it is: a collection of working agreements the country has chosen to honour, not a sacred text. The moment you write it down, you create a new class - the people who interpret the text - and you have not empowered citizens so much as created a priesthood. Burnham wants devolution entrenched in law; the counter-argument is that if a vote cannot undo what a vote has done, the vote has stopped mattering.

What to watch: whether Labour's devolution agenda gathers enough momentum to make constitutional reform an active question, or whether this remains a mayor with a platform rather than a government with a plan.