Hanging around with Yanks who know their stuff educated me on this debate and I do appreciate it. I think there is a different culture which is born from a different history and geography so the UK and US will have different realities. US gun laws wouldn't be practical here, but at the same time UK or most Euro gun laws wouldn't work stateside.
So when Brits or Euros or whoever try to lecture America on its laws they need to sit down and shut up. They are ignorant and arrogant to assume what is fine for them is fine for others, gets a bit embarrassing.
Course same goes for Yanks trying to tell us how wrong we are
I haven't studied extensively but my guess is you guys over there still have your same system of government put in place by George Washington. It has adapted over the years but it is still fundamentally a Republic based on the rules they wrote. You haven't really needed to change it and apart from that hiccup in the 1860s things have been fairly stable.
But over here? We've had more violent revolutions, coups, civil wars, dynastic conflicts and invasions than I can easily name
Our system of government has changed dozens of times and usually as a result of violence. We had that whole armed populace thing , indeed it was mandated by law for a couple of centuries, and in our experience it just made it easier to wage internal wars.
The last couple of internal wars we had killed a notable percentage of the population, at which point I reckon everyone got a bit sick of it.
So British culture and systems of government are an evolution from that, it was trial and error with bits added on every few decades as a result of some sort of war or uprising. This ends up making a different culture, and no not a weak one that hides from violence but one where every level understands their role and what happens when they exceed their power. The elites in America maybe haven't had the shock of the ordinary people rising against them, over here the common man beheaded a king and a bunch of his lords which helps keep some perspective. Its notable that was the last real civil war, made the point pretty well.
So it is cultural. The British don't need a written right to keep their leaders in check because we've had a thousand years of practical demonstrations. The Government has power but it doesn't have authority, it can't overrule a law or command an army, the system has checks, balances and clear separation of power built into it which doesn't really exist in other countries outside the Dominions. If it tries to exceed its authority it gets slapped down, and the same goes for the monarchy and judiciary. Perfectly balanced by distrust of each other
A large part of the reason for those civil wars and internal issues is an unwillingness to actually write down the rules and enforce them. Well that and the fact that in the British system you don't actually have any kind of divided government.
Ever since you utterly gutted the House of Lords and the Crown, you have had a defacto unitary government in the House of Commons and it has
no limits under your system on what it can or cannot do.
Having a largely unwritten system worked when you have a nobility worth the name (as opposed to a collection of life peers given their titles largely because of favors done for the Tories or Labour) that actually had economic, political, and military power.
Having the Prime Minister be an internal selection of the House of Commons largely worked when the Crown was able to remove Prime Ministers that it felt were failing their role or just didn't like.
As it is now, you have a Crown that is literally a rubber stamp and whose prerogatives are willfully ignored by the House of Commons at whim (otherwise, Queens Assent would have been needed to delay Brexit); it has no ability to exercise oversight of any kind nor any power independent of prestige.
You have a House of Lords that is a rubber stamp made up of life peers without power, without independent resource bases, without military experience, without local political power. And you have Lords Reform that is never going to happen because actually creating a reformed House of Lords that could be useful would require that the Commons cede substantial power so as to create an actual bicameral system of equals.
You have a House of Commons that is utterly dominated by political parties and whose individual members are essentially forbidden to breath without permission from the front benches.
This House of Commons then makes whomever the leader of the dominant party of MP's is the Prime Minister until internal party dynamics see them removed. The Ministers of the various Ministries are selected nigh entirely for party political reasons and to shore up the PM's support in their party, with no real concern over their ability to actually do their job and zero ability for anyone to check the PM in this. In addition, all of them serve at the pleasure of the PM and without any inherent power of their own.
And then there are the devolved parliaments.
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Ultimately, the problems with the British system are almost entirely the fault of not actually having a designed government with popular buy in to its structure and clearly established powers and procedures for changing that structure.
It is instead the result of several hundred years of changing whims and compromises with nothing clearly established save that the House of Commons can do whatever the fuck they can get a majority of their members to agree to.
It doesn't help that you are also next to Europe and dealing with Europeans. When the US rejected British rule, it was just that; a rejection. It wasn't a coup or a revolution, it was taking a bunch of land from what was seen as a foreign power and then creating their own system from the ground up.
Virtually all of the various European changes in government have been much more moderate things. Kingdoms became Constitutional Monarchies became Parliamentary Democracies became dictatorships became restored democracies, etc. Between WW0, WW1, WW2, the collapse of the Empires, the USSR, the fall of the USSR, and the EU/Euro; Europe has spent the past hundred and fifty or so years creating and recreating its governmental structures based on the exigencies of the moment and usually without any kind of clear thought process.
In contrast, the biggest change in governmental structure the US has had was the civil war (which was, again, 150 years ago); and by European standards that was a minor tweaking of the structure; not a fundamental transformation. The next two biggest changes were the direct election of Senators and fixing the size of the House of Representatives (because they were too lazy to do their damn jobs); 1913 and 1929 respectively.
The US has had generations to build up trust in the basic structure of its government and for their to be agreement between the populace and the various branches of the government over what role each has and what its limits are (at least in the broad strokes, lots of disagreement still remains over the details).
None of the European governments have that generational trust; for most fundamental structural transformations in government are within
living memory. And those fundamental structural transformations? They were achieved with or predicated on violence; often internal violence.
