Essential reading

The All Wales Convention will present its long-awaited report and recommendations on Wednesday, and every blog and media outlet in Wales will of course have something to say about it.

I'm quite sure none of us would want to have an uniformed view of the constitutional situation of either Wales or of the UK as a whole, so to put things into some sort of overall context I'd like to recommend a little light reading for the weekend. Just click on this picture:

   

And if my recommendation isn't enough, this is what some others have said about it:

Democratic Audit’s spoof constitution is very funny on the way we are governed until you realise with a shiver just how real it all is. Those of us who wish to improve and deepen our democracy must find ways of doing so in the face of the major obstacles that this satirical document all too clearly identifies.

Hilary Wainwright, editor of Red Pepper

This is a brilliant document — and a searing lampoon of the ridiculous state of our political arrangements. It exposes all the glaring faults and the silent assumptions that deform our system, preventing it from ever functioning in a way that we, the people, deserve.

Helena Kennedy QC, member of the unreformed House of Lords

It is difficult not to read this brilliant exposé of the traditions of cant, deception and arrogance that serve as Britain’s constitution without feeling admiration for the authors and a profound anger for the self-perpetuating political classes that continue to rule.

Henry Porter, political columnist and novelist

For centuries, the UK state simultaneously ran a despotic empire overseas and a liberal constitutional polity at home. Democratic Audit’s spoof constitution brilliantly captures how the constitutional schizophrenia this induced in our governing elite continues to shape the fabric of modern British politics and to undermine the lives and liberty of every citizen.

Professor Patrick Dunleavy, London School of Economics

To echo the first quote, let's not fail to take the opportunity this referendum will give us to, if only in a small way, "improve and deepen our democracy" in Wales.