Proposals for constitutional reform in the United Kingdom are ex amined critically. Ideas of ‘governance’ as posited by various accounts in the literature of politics are compared with the simpler idea of ‘government’ that is predicated within the reform programme. It is argued that changes in the site of public power, as well as in the reality of its ex ercise through a range of bodies beyond the traditional state, now provide a much more complex situation than the reform programme acknowledges. The paper calls for the development of a new technology of constitutional control to capture fugitive power. T he paper concludes with a brief ex amination of some newer theories of radical or participatory democracy and their potential to assist in a wider project of constitutional renewal. THE CONSTITUTIONAL REFORM PROJECT ‘If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change’ Guiseppe Thomasi di Lampedusa, T he L eopard Constitutional reform in the United Kingdom is traditionally an incremental process of informal change to an informal structure – even when it appears in a radical version as in the Thatcher years. Given this, it may be only a slight exaggeration to describe Tony Blair as the most far reaching, radical reformer of the formal edifice of the constitution since Oliver Cromwell. The ambition and scale of the Labour government’s reform project is as remark- able as its speedy implementation. The Blair programme provides for detailed, institutional change to transform and ‘modernize’ government in © Blackwell Publishers Ltd 1998, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA * Professor of Jurisprudence, School of Law, The Queen’s University of Belfast, Belfast BT7 1NN, Northern Ireland The origins of some aspects of this paper lie with an inaugural lecture given at The Queen’s University of Belfast in February 1998. A part of the argument was developed at the Socio- Legal Studies Association conference in Manchester in April 1998. The author would like to acknowledge all those who made useful comments and suggestions including Tom Hadden, Elizabeth Meehan, Colin Harvey, and Thérèse Murphy – although of course they do not necessarily approve of everything here. 510 J OURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY VOLUME 25, N UMBER 4, D ECEMBER 1998 ISSN: 0263–323X, pp. 510–35 The Case Against Constitutional Reform? J OHN M ORISON*