One area in which there was a clear divide between the parties in 1997 was that of constitutional reform. The Conservatives were defenders of existing arrangements. Labour advocated a major overhaul of the nation's constitutional arrangements. The party's proposals did not figure at the forefront of the party's election manifesto – they appeared on pages 32 and 33 – but they presaged a major change in the constitutional landscape of the United Kingdom. Although the implementation of the proposals was not exhaustive, by May 2007 the British Constitution was very different from that which existed when Tony Blair entered Downing Street.

Labour's proposals

By the 1990s, the basic tenets of the British Constitution had not changed substantially since the emergence of a cabinet-centred Westminster model of government in the late nineteenth century. UK membership of the European Communities in 1973 was the only major change of recent decades to challenge some of the basic principles. Otherwise, the constitutional landscape for much of the past century had been largely undisturbed and, for a good part of the period, had not figured on the agenda of political debate.

Demands for change began to be heard in the 1960s and 1970s. There was evidence of a growing discontent with the system of government, especially in parts of the United Kingdom distant from London. The Labour government appointed a Royal Commission on the Constitution in 1969: its report in 1973 recommended that ‘devolution could do much to reduce the discontent’.