Godfrey Bloom

Perhaps Lord Oakshott should read this excellent 100 year old appraisal.

ENGLISH CONSTITUTION

The importance of the English Constitution in the political history of mankind is so great that the question of its origin is of unusual interest. The unanimous judgement of the world at the beginning of the twentieth century is that this is the best system of government yet devised. All monarchies which have adopted a constitution have derived their forms from it, and the same is true of most republics. Local necessities, or local prejudices, have made the adoption in individual cases more or less complete, or have led to variations from the typical forms, but these are hardly sufficient, even in the most extreme case, to conceal the indebtedness. The English Constitution has made the circuit of the globe and become the common possession of civilised man. After so many centuries of experiment, practical action, whatever be the opinion of the theorist, unites to declare this the best result of all experience. If this is true, the question from what and how it began to be should be considered one of the greatest and most absorbing of all historical studies.

Some definition is, however, necessary for the sake of clearness. By the term constitution, as used above, is not meant the whole system of government, all the organs of the state, the whole political machinery, national and local. What is meant is the machinery of a limited monarchy those devices by which an absolutism, once existing in fact, can be retained in form and theory while the real government of the state is transformed into a democratic republic.

From: The Origin of the English Constitution by George Burton Adams, Professor of History at Yale University, 1912.