{"id":22849,"date":"2018-04-11T09:20:50","date_gmt":"2018-04-11T08:20:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=22849"},"modified":"2018-04-11T09:20:50","modified_gmt":"2018-04-11T08:20:50","slug":"british-political-institutions-1-the-constitution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=22849","title":{"rendered":"British political institutions (1): the constitution"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I like to attend short courses at the City Literary Institute in central London and I&#8217;ve just started a six-week course on <em>&#8220;British Political Institutions&#8221;.<\/em> I already know quite a lot about this subject and have written a website essay on the topic, but there is always more to learn.<\/p>\n<p>The first session of the course was delivered by American lecturer Dale Mineshima-Lowe and covered the British constitution or lack of it. \u00a0Among the things I learned were the following:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Britain, Israel, New Zealand and Saudi Arabia are the only countries in the world without a codified constitution.<\/li>\n<li>The oldest constitution is that of the United States which dates back to 1789.<\/li>\n<li>The least frequently amended constitution is that of the USA &#8211; 27 changes in almost 230 years.<\/li>\n<li>The most frequently amended constitution is that Mexico &#8211; more than 500 changes in around 100 years.<\/li>\n<li>The shortest constitutions are those of Jordan, Libya and Iceland, each of which is just 2,000-4,000 words.<\/li>\n<li>The longest constitution is that of India at 146,000 words.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>You can read more about the British political system in my guide <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/Britishpoliticalsystem.html\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I like to attend short courses at the City Literary Institute in central London and I&#8217;ve just started a six-week course on &#8220;British Political Institutions&#8221;. I already know quite a lot about this subject and have written a website essay on the topic, but there is always more to learn. The first session of the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-british-current-affairs"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22849"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22849\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22852,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22849\/revisions\/22852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}