The nation is in serious mourning. Every event I was due to attend this week has been cancelled or postponed. But the contrast between our change of leadership in government and our change of leadership as Head of State is extraordinary. In government we have been messing around for months following the resignation of Boris Johnson after a series of scandals and only about 20% of the population expect our new Prime Minister to do a good job. Our revered Queen after an extraordinary life of service to the nation in my opinion hung on to life to do her last constitutional duty of asking her 15th Prime Minister to form a government and then passed away in her beloved Balmoral. Her son, who has had seventy years to prepare, has taken over instantly with dignity and skill and the great majority of the British population and that of the 15 other countries of which he is now King believe he will do a great job although he will obviously have much less time in the role.
 
I worked with Charles on one of his projects[i] and found him imaginative, enlightened and entrepreneurial. He was ahead of his time in his warnings about the environment and sustainability and indeed on many other issues has been a voice of reason. His foundation, the Prince's Trust, has helped over 500,000 young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to get into work. I also worked with him on his initiative Business in the Community which encouraged Business to get involved in helping with Community issues like homelessness. He is highly cultured as a talented painter and a fine cellist. He has already demonstrated his commitment to public service over more than half a century and will stand by the same values that his excellent mother demonstrated.
 
In my blog The Conservative Party in Crisis (2)[ii] I examined the two final candidates for the leadership of the Conservative party. I concluded that there were many weaknesses in Liz Truss’s record that showed that while she has experience of the Cabinet over 10 years or so, overall most of her achievements were of the easy to do variety while the difficult to do were kicked down the road. It seems that in her first few days in office she is continuing in this vein. In her first speech as Prime Minister she said that she would appoint people to her cabinet from all over the Conservative party. In fact, nearly all of her appointments were of people who had supported her in her campaign with just a few who had not declared publicly who they were supporting. Noone at all who had supported Rishi Sunak was appointed thus wasting the contribution of many experienced members of the party.
 
Although she won the overall vote among Conservative party members, 18% of them abstained so she did not even get a majority of the Conservative party members. She clearly had not got a majority of Members of Parliament where Mr. Sunak had more support. This does not bode well for the future. One of her more bizarre appointments was of a grossly obese person as Secretary of State for Health. Yet another example of the mantra of “Do as I say, not as I do” that characterised the Johnson regime.
 
 One of her first acts has been to try to solve the energy crisis of ever higher prices by imposing a price cap from 1st October. But there is no plan that I can see as to how this will be funded and indeed what it will cost as no one could know that. So, we have a Prime Minister whose first act in government has been to sign a blank cheque for the cost of our energy over the next two years, the most irresponsible action I have ever seen any prime minister make in my lifetime other than the support of the American invasion of Iraq by Tony Blair.
 
That is enough about British constitutional matters and I want to devote the rest of this blog to the constitutional matters that are taking place in the other country that is important to the Pearson household, that of Chile.  
 
Over the past few years a constitutional crisis has been developing in Chile. Left-wing interests ranging from left of centre to extremist have been complaining for a long time about inequalities in Chile in both income and education. In fact, the inequalities in income in Chile are the least in the whole of South America. Virtually all countries in the world have inequality of income and there is no political system that can remedy that completely. All socialist attempts to do so fail but also lead to economic stagnation. However, extremists in Chile turned to violence to seek to win their arguments and in the end forced the then President Piñera to concede that there would be a new constitution that would be put together by a representative group of people and then put to the country in a plebiscite.
 
The left had complained about the existing constitution for some time which they said was the work of President Pinochet, the Chilean dictator who had come to power in 1973 in a coup d’état against then President Allende. It is true the constitution that was in place was based on Pinochet’s 1980 constitution except that after the return of democracy 33 years ago it had been amended on numerous occasions and is very different than it was in 1980 and does have several political rights. For example, in 2005 during the presidency of Ricardo Lagos, a socialist, a significant overhaul of the document ended Pinochet’s senators-for-life and other senatorial appointments.
 
In my blog Challenges Facing Chile’s New Government[iii] in January this year I examined this situation in more detail. I described just how often the constitution had been amended. In no less than 24 of the years from 1991 to 2021 the constitution was amended and yet the new President Gabriel Boric continued to say publicly that this was Pinochet’s constitution. Of course, he is only 35 years old, dropped out of university, has never had a proper job and as he is unmarried has no experience of family life. He must be the least experienced political leader in any democracy anywhere in the world.
 
The new constitution with its 388 articles, many of which would have led to severe economic and political disruption, had to go to plebiscite. Under Chilean law it is compulsory for all adults to vote in such a plebiscite unless they have extremely good reasons for being unable to do so. Voting must take place in person and so, for example, someone who is bedridden might not be able to participate but otherwise if you do not have a valid reason such as that you will be heavily fined by the police.
 
On the same day as we learnt that Liz Truss had won the Tory party leadership election, we also learnt that the Chilean people rejected the new constitution by 62% to 38%. This shows significant popular support in the country for liberal democracy, individual freedom and equality under the law. One of the features of the proposed constitution was to give autonomy to the indigenous people of the Mapuche and other tribes. This had been pushed by extremists among these people who have resorted to significant terrorist incidents such as setting fire to churches, flour mills and private houses. However over 80% of the Mapuche people voted against the constitution clearly demonstrating that these terrorists were not representative of the tribes as a whole. The great majority fully understood that if they had this kind of independence as tiny nations they would finish up as poor as Venezuela or Haiti.
 
Clearly this result was good news, but it does not mean that she is now safe from the illiberal ideologues who wrote and backed this stupid proposal. Chile’s socialists and communists are not going away. In article 142 of the 2019 amendment to allow the process of a rewrite, in reference to  the constitutional assembly’s final text, it says: “If the question raised to the citizens and the ratifying plebiscite is rejected, (the current constitution) will remain in force. “In other words the issue is dead.  
 
In my opinion the reliance on constitutions to solve political and economic problems is mistaken. If the public have grievances about the state’s inferior record on health, education, personal security and support of the elderly than what is required is new and innovative changes to public policy which is made through legislation. Sadly, I think we are likely to see a less free, more populist Chile as has happened in so many other South American countries which will damage economic mobility and living standards.

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