A.V.Dicey, the grand-daddy of English constitutional theory, argued that the British Constitution was primarily structural rather than normative, and this is an orthodoxy that has survived to the present day. The conventional standpoint is that Parliament is absolutely sovereign, and an Act of Parliament is “legally perfect”. Perhaps Mr. Sharpe is simply betraying an acquaintance with the British system, and a failure to appreciate the revolutionary – and therefore value-loaded – genesis of most of the world’s states.

Then he said this: “A state needs to adopt one principle over another to function (after all, the state needs a political ideology in order to form a government)”

In Britain, no clear delineation can be made between state and government. This may make us sound like some sub-Saharan dictatorship, but the truth is that governing and legislating are performed by an increasingly empowered executive. In the UK, the government’s ideology is the state’s; we have no system of substantive judicial review of statute.

For example, David Miliband in this month’s prospect magazine talks of his personal belief in liberal interventionism as the best vehicle for foreign policy. That, it seems, has also become the ideology of the United Kingdom. We need a government (don’t we?) so we need people to fill it. This necessity means our state ideologies are the personal ones of our governors; in the US, it is the personal ideologies of the founding fathers, in France the revolutionaries.

Unsurprisingly, power is with the powerful. State ideologies are a political inevitability.