Part XI, The Territorial Constitution

The Union, the Nations, Devolution & Local Government. Derived from Axiom 12 (subsidiarity), 1 (sovereignty rests on consent), 3 (ends from the people). The United Kingdom is a union of four nations, not a unitary blob. A design for the UK specifically has to settle who decides what, at which level, and on what basis the Union itself holds together. The current settlement is ad hoc, asymmetric, and revocable at Westminster's pleasure; this Part fixes that.

XI.1 The territorial question

The UK is England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, distinct nations with distinct identities, plus regions and thousands of localities. Three failures of the current arrangement:

• Devolution is revocable. Powers "devolved" to Edinburgh, Cardiff, and Belfast can, in strict law, be clawed back by Westminster, so the settlement rests on restraint, not right.
• The English anomaly. England has no parliament of its own; English matters and UK matters are conflated (the "West Lothian" problem).
• No clear, consented basis for the Union or for leaving it, producing recurring constitutional crises rather than a stable, honest answer.

This Part settles all three by codifying the territorial constitution in the Charter, so it cannot be unilaterally altered by any single level (§I.9).

XI.2 Principles: subsidiarity and consent

1. Subsidiarity (Axiom 12): every power sits at the most local level that can exercise it effectively. The burden is on higher levels to justify centralisation, never the reverse.
2. The Union by consent (Axiom 1): the United Kingdom holds together by the ongoing consent of its constituent nations, not by coercion. A union that cannot be left is a cage; a union that dissolves on a whim is no union. The model provides a defined, dignified middle.
3. Where sovereignty lies (the Union's foundational question, answered). The UK is a union of constituent nations: sovereignty is pooled — held by the whole people of the United Kingdom acting together and resting on the ongoing consent of each nation as a constituent people. It is therefore neither purely unitary (one people who could restructure or abolish the nations at will) nor purely confederal (four separate sovereignties with no common demos). Concretely: UK-wide reserved matters are decided by the whole people through the UK institutions; national competences are entrenched and cannot be clawed back unilaterally (§XI.4); and a nation may leave only by the self-determination route (§XI.5). This pooled-sovereignty model is stated explicitly so that every downstream rule — entrenchment, amendment, secession, equalisation — has one coherent basis, and §I.2.1 ("the people of the United Kingdom") is read as this union of peoples, not as a single undifferentiated demos.

XI.3 The allocation of powers, codified, not ad hoc

A clear, written division of competence, entrenched in the Charter and adjudicated by the Rights & Constitutional Court (§IX.4):

Reserved powers model: competences are devolved by default; only those explicitly reserved sit at UK level. Disputes over the boundary go to the Constitutional Court, not to whoever currently holds power.

XI.4 The structure, entrenched, symmetric, federal-in-substance

• Entrenched devolution. National competences are protected by the Charter; Westminster (the UK Representative Assembly) cannot unilaterally claw them back, fixing the current settlement's fatal flaw. Reallocations of competence short of secession require the consent of the level affected, via the §I.9 process. Secession is governed separately, and by the seceding nation's consent alone, under §XI.5 — the two are not confused.
• Each nation runs the model at its scale, its own assembly elected by STV+, its own expert-delivery within mandate, its own integrity oversight (Parts III-VI), in its devolved competences.
• An English tier (recommended settlement). England's anomaly is that it has no parliament of its own — English-only matters and UK matters are conflated — while England's size (≈85% of the UK) means a single English Parliament would rival the UK tier and recreate West Lothian in reverse (an English First Minister overshadowing the UK head of government; a near-total overlap of the English and UK electorates and mandates). The form is a value choice for the people of England (§V.4), but the model does not dodge it. The recommended settlement is strong devolution to English regions and combined authorities for regional matters, with genuinely English-only national business handled by the UK Representative Assembly sitting as a standing English-only configuration (proper "English votes for English laws", with its own committee and scrutiny stage), rather than a single rival English Parliament. This ends the anomaly without creating a rival executive or a duplicate mandate. The dominance/overlap problem is confronted head-on, not deferred (§XI.9).
• The nations represented at UK level. The UK second chamber carries a territorial dimension — the nations are represented in UK-level decisions that affect them, alongside the sortition function (§IX.2). The recommended composition (territorial representation balanced with the sortition function) is set in the Recommended Settlement (§XVIII).

XI.5 The right of self-determination

The Union-by-consent principle requires an honest, lawful answer to "can a nation leave?":

• Yes — and this route is an explicit carve-out from §I.9. Secession is the one change to the territorial division that does not require UK-wide consent: it needs the sustained consent of the seceding nation alone, plus a negotiated settlement. A Union a nation could leave only if the rest of the UK agreed would be a cage, not a union by consent, and would let England (≈85% of the electorate) veto another nation's departure. §XI.4's UK-wide §I.9 consent governs reallocations short of secession; §XI.5 governs secession.
• The bar is high, deliberative, and fixed in the entrenched layer so no single government can move it: a confirmed majority in two votes of the seceding nation, held no less than three years apart, each on a defined turnout floor, with a mandatory deliberation period between them, followed by an orderly settlement in which the debt-and-asset split follows the formula entrenched in advance (§X.8) — only its mechanical application is negotiated, never the leverage — alongside citizenship, borders, the position of minorities, and the fiscal transition (§XI.7). The threshold is part of the super-entrenched core (§I.9.2) and can be changed only by the extraordinary route (§I.9.3), so an incumbent nationalist government cannot lower it and a hostile centre cannot raise it out of reach.
• This is neither a trap (a nation is not held by force) nor a hair-trigger (two votes, three years, deliberation). It replaces recurring constitutional crisis with a known procedure.
• Northern Ireland is the exception: its Good Friday Agreement border-poll mechanism (a simple-majority poll) prevails over this route (§XI.8).

XI.6 Local government

• Empowered and protected. Local government runs the model at local scale (elected + expert + integrity), with real revenue and spending powers (§X.8) and protection from arbitrary central abolition, local democracy is not a gift the centre can withdraw.
• Structure. The local tier comprises elected local authorities (by STV+) and, where the people choose, combined authorities / mayoralties for city-regions, with clear, published competences and the real local revenue base of §X.8. The precise structure is set by the nations under subsidiarity, within these constitutional guarantees.
• Local participation: local sortition panels and citizen assemblies (Part II) bring deliberative democracy closest to where people live.
• Proportionate, not full replication. "Runs the model" at local scale does not mean standing up a full Integrity family, sortition chamber, and court in each of 300+ localities — that would breach minimal-complexity (Axiom 14). Instead the *national integrity and judicial bodies reach down (every local act is auditable and justiciable by them) while local sortition panels and citizen juries provide local deliberation and oversight. Local integrity oversight is thus owned* — by the national bodies plus local juries — not left to a seam between Parts VI, IX and XI.

XI.7 Equalisation and solidarity

• A transparent equalisation formula transfers resources from richer to poorer nations and regions, so subsidiarity does not entrench geographic injustice.
• The Union functions as mutual insurance, pooled resilience against asymmetric shocks (a regional industry collapse, a localised disaster), which is itself a rational argument for the Union, made in the open.

XI.8 Northern Ireland's particular position

Northern Ireland is handled with the specific care its history demands, and the *Good Friday/Belfast Agreement prevails as lex specialis*** over the general territorial rules wherever they differ:

• The border-poll consent principle prevails over §XI.5. NI may become part of a united Ireland on a simple majority in a border poll called under the Agreement's terms; the high supermajority self-determination bar of §XI.5 does not apply to NI. This is honoured as a binding prior commitment, not overridden.
• The Agreement is an international treaty (the British-Irish Agreement) to which the Republic of Ireland is co-signatory. Nothing in this Charter purports to rewrite it unilaterally, and changes to the NI settlement require Ireland's consent as the treaty provides. This is reconciled with §I.7 (no treaty overrides the core) by incorporating the Agreement's guarantees into the Charter's own terms for NI, rather than treating them as an external override.
• Consociational government prevails over "each nation runs the model" (§XI.4) to the extent they differ: NI's cross-community power-sharing (mandatory coalition, community-designation safeguards, cross-community voting protections) is preserved where BIG's majoritarian-deliberative institutions would otherwise conflict with it.
• The ECHR remains directly enforceable in NI law, as the Agreement requires (see the ECHR settlement, §I.7a).
• The cross-border institutions (the North-South Ministerial Council and the all-island implementation bodies) and the rights of both communities are explicitly safeguarded.

XI.9 Failure modes and safeguards

Part XI ends. Next: Part XII, Justice, Security & the Use of Force.