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An extensive literature on aversive constitutionalism and elite blockages outlines the manner in which embedded political elites will generally reject or dilute reform agendas that threaten their privileged position within a constitutional configuration. It is for exactly this reason that the same seam of scholarship frequently highlights the role of crises in terms of providing a 'window of opportunity' through which a significant or fundamental recalibration of a political system may be achieved. 'The Palace of Westminster' the Joint Committee on Restoration and Renewal (R&R) concluded in September 2016 'faces an impending crisis which we cannot possibly ignore'. Their recommendation was that the Palace be completely vacated for five to eight years so that a multibillion-pound programme of rebuilding work can be undertaken. This article offers the first research-based analysis of the 'Scoping & Planning' stage (2012-2016) and reveals the 'hidden politics' of R&R in the sense of how it threatens both the British Political Tradition and the position of the two main parties. This explains the nature of the very closed and secretive decision-making processes that have characterised this stage and why a number of formative decision-making points that have been deployed to frame and restrict the reform parameters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there is no doubt that the British constitution has been significantly reformed since the election of Labour in May 1997, the degree to which these reforms have altered the nature of British democracy remains deeply contested. A major problem within this debate is that it has become polarised around a binary distinction between consensual or majoritarian models of democracy when the contemporary situation is more complex. This article develops the concept of 'meta-constitutional orientations' in order to argue that the distinctive element of 'New' Labour's approach to constitutional engineering is not that it has shifted the nature of British democracy from one model to another but has, instead, sought to apply different models at the periphery and core: hi-constitutionality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]