Glossary

Plain-English definitions of the defined terms used throughout the rulebook. Required by the plain-English duty (§0.7) and Criterion 11 (simplicity & usability). Where a term is specified in detail, the section reference is given.

BIG / British Intelligent Governance, the project and the model: a clean-slate, first-principles design for governing the United Kingdom.

Foundational Charter, the codified, written, supreme law from which all power flows and by which all of it is bound (Part I). Replaces the UK's uncodified constitution.

Inviolable rights, fundamental rights that bind every decision (§I.3). Class A are non-derogable even in crisis: most are exceptionless (e.g. freedom from torture — the top lock that yields to nothing); two (★ the right to life, ★ equality before the law) carry a single written, closed exception; and the individual eligible citizen's right to vote is elevated here as the substance of sovereignty. Class B are qualified, limitable only by the proportionality test — except the minimum free-expression, press-plurality and truthful-information floor needed for free elections, which sits in the super-entrenched core (§I.9.2).

Proportionality test, the only lawful way to limit a Class B right: prescribed by law, legitimate aim, necessary, proportionate, time-limited, with the state bearing the burden of proof (§I.3.1).

Super-entrenched core (near-eternity), the handful of provisions changeable only by the extraordinary, cross-generational route (§I.9.3), never by ordinary legislation or a single amendment: the people's sovereignty, Class A rights, free and informed elections and the individual franchise, the Court's structural independence, and the amendment rule itself. "Near-eternity, not eternity": a sustained supermajority across two mandates can still change it, so the founding generation does not bind its successors absolutely and there is no literal dead hand (§I.9.2).

Constitutional-convention procedure, a convened joint sitting (not a standing body) of the Sortition Chamber — a majority of members — the Assembly, and a Court panel, ending in a referendum, that classifies the boundary of the super-entrenched core against its enumerated contents and runs the extraordinary route, so the Kompetenz-Kompetenz question is distributed across sortition + Assembly + Court + the people rather than held by any one institution (§I.9.4a). Drafting errors are cured by a Court erratum (§I.9.4), not by this procedure.

Pooled sovereignty, the Union's basis: sovereignty is held by the whole people of the UK acting together and rests on the ongoing consent of each nation as a constituent people, neither purely unitary nor confederal (§XI.2).

Founding discontinuity / rule of recognition, the honest account of how the Charter becomes binding: not by one Parliament binding its successors (impossible under the old order) but by a consented constitutional founding, gated on the courts' recognition of the Charter as supreme law (§XV.1.1).

The People, the sovereign source of all authority; power is delegated, conditional, and revocable (Axiom 1). Who counts as the people is defined on a civic, rights-bound basis (Part XIII).

Mandate, what the people have asked the government to do: the ends and acceptable trade-offs, set through elections and direct participation (Parts II-III). Experts execute the mandate; they do not write it.

Ends vs means, the central distinction (§0.5): the people decide the ends (values, priorities, acceptable trade-offs); the competent decide the means (how to achieve them) within delegated scope.

Value-flagging, the test that detects when a supposedly "technical" decision is really a hidden value choice, escalating it from experts back to democratic decision (§V.4).

STV+, Single Transferable Vote, enhanced: the recommended electoral system, multi-member constituencies, ranked ballots, Droop quota, plus an independent boundary authority, verifiable count, audit, and voter education (Part III). Scores 81/100 vs FPTP's 39/100 on BIG's matrix.

FPTP, First Past the Post: the current UK voting system, rejected as structurally flawed (Part III).

Gallagher Index, a standard measure of how far seat share diverges from vote share; above 10 indicates severe distortion (UK 2019: 11.8).

Sortition, selection by lot. Used to form Citizens' Assemblies and the standing Citizens' Sortition Chamber, demographically representative bodies immune to campaign money and re-election incentives (§II.3, §IX.2).

Representative Assembly, the elected (STV+) legislative chamber that proposes and makes law, sets priorities and budgets, and confirms appointments (§IX.2).

Expert Execution Layer, the domain bodies (Economy, Health, etc.) that choose and deliver the means within bounded, published scope; appointed via a four-stage anti-capture process (Part IV).

Review · Pause · Correct, the error-correction loop: any decision can be paused, reviewed against its predicted outcomes, and reversed (§V.7).

Integrity & Safeguard system, a small family of independent bodies — Statistics & Outcomes, Algorithm & Data Audit, and a consolidated Integrity Enforcement Office (anti-corruption + rights-compliance + whistleblower) — plus a *multi-custody ledger function*** (keys split across the three bodies + external notaries). Kept to the minimum split that separates the genuinely dangerous concentration (record + measure + audit + message); the message (Public Information) sits outside. Each watched by citizen juries (Part VI). "The Integrity Assembly" is shorthand for the relevant body, never a single all-powerful one.

Materiality-affirmation panel (formerly "boundary panel"; renamed to avoid collision with the electoral Independent Boundary Authority), a screened, walled-off function of the Citizens' Sortition Chamber (not a new body) that must affirm the AI Router's value/technical classification for material decisions before it binds — using blind re-classification, with near-threshold and constitutional-magnitude calls defaulting upward — so routing (deciding who decides) is never left to the machine alone (§XIX.3).

Verifiable sortition, selection by lot made auditable: a public randomness beacon, a reconciled published roll, and an open algorithm let any citizen re-run a draw and confirm the panel was fairly selected — so the lot is a defended primitive, not a trusted one (§VI.3a).

Who guards the guardians, the requirement (Axiom 4) that the integrity body, courts, and every check are themselves checked; answered ultimately by rotating citizen juries and the people (§VI.3).

Transparency ledger, the public, append-only, tamper-evident record of decisions, public money, anonymised results, and reasoning, independently replicated and auditable by any citizen (§VI.6, §VIII.4).

Outcomes ledger / wellbeing composite, the continuous public measurement of how the country is actually doing against the objective (§0.2, §VI.7); the feedback loop that tells the people whether governance works.

Crisis Defence Council, the doctrine-bound body that coordinates verified emergencies within hard limits (Part VII).

Threat Verification Matrix, the process that independently verifies a claimed emergency before any emergency power activates, with the verifier separate from the beneficiary (§VII.3).

End-to-end verifiable voting (E2E-V), voting where each voter can confirm their vote was cast, recorded, and counted correctly, while keeping the ballot secret and receipt-free (un-provable to a coercer); software-independent (errors detectable even if the software is malicious); paper-backed; checked by risk-limiting audits (§VIII.3).

Zero-knowledge proof / unlinkable credentials, cryptography that lets a citizen prove eligibility (e.g. "eligible and not yet voted") without revealing identity or letting their activities be linked, the basis of private, sybil-resistant digital identity with no surveillance graph (§VIII.2).

Fiscal constitution, the constitutional rules governing public money: taxation by law, transparent outcome-linked budgets, debt rules, intergenerational accounting, and independent fiscal and monetary authorities (Part X).

Intergenerational accounting / long-term fund, publishing the state's true balance sheet including future liabilities, and a sovereign endowment that saves windfalls for future generations (§X.4, §X.6).

Territorial constitution, the codified, consented division of power between UK-wide, national (the four nations), and local levels, including entrenched devolution and a lawful self-determination route (Part XI).

Reserved vs devolved, powers explicitly kept at UK level (reserved) versus everything else, which sits with the nations/localities by default (§XI.3).

Subsidiarity, decisions made at the most local level that can make them effectively; the centre must justify centralisation (Axiom 12).

Militant democracy, the problem of a free system defending itself against those who would use its freedoms to destroy it; resolved by structure-first defence and a narrow, court-controlled last resort (§XIV.3).

Enforcement of last resort, what forces a captured power to obey the rules: oaths to the Charter (not to persons), the duty to refuse unlawful orders, distributed loyalty of the forces, and ultimately the engaged citizenry (§XIV.4).

Capture, any faction (elite, corporate, foreign, populist, expert, administrative) seizing the system for itself; the model is designed against all forms by construction (Axiom 11, Part XVI).

Defence-in-depth, relying on many independent safeguards so no single one is load-bearing; capturing the system requires defeating all of them at once (§XVI.5).

The rubric / the score, the twelve weighted criteria by which any governing system, including this one, is judged (§0.4). The model commits to scoring itself against them in public forever (§XVII.5), and to an independent scorer — external experts + a citizens' jury + a published red-team — whose score is published alongside the self-score (§0.4.1), so the grade is never the authors' alone.

Value-flagging ("material"), the operable test for whether a decision is a value choice (people decide) or technical (experts decide): flagged on distribution / present-vs-future / contested risk / rights, where "material" is defined by scale, identifiability, irreversibility, and reasonable contestation, with a published per-domain threshold; contested cases default to escalation (§V.4).

Disestablishment, removing the Church of England's established status and governing role — no established church, no Lords Spiritual, no religious role for the head of state — while the churches continue freely as voluntary bodies with full religious liberty (§I.5.2).

Incorporate-and-exceed (ECHR), the recommended settlement of the new Charter's relation to the European Convention: remain in the ECHR, draft Charter rights to meet or exceed the Convention floor, and let the higher protection prevail; required for Northern Ireland by the Good Friday Agreement (§I.7a).

Collective-defence mandate, a standing, pre-authorised Assembly mandate to honour a treaty-triggered obligation (e.g. NATO Article 5) immediately, with reporting, sunset, and retrospective scrutiny — predictability for allies without an executive war of choice (§XII.6b).

Nuclear command authority, the gravest state power, constitutionalised: the deterrent posture is a public value choice, and any release requires a defined, multi-person, decapitation-surviving human chain — never one person and never a machine (§XII.6a).

See README.md for the full structure and the architecture diagram.