Today's headlines about Gordon Brown's various plans for his Premiership are interesting, if rather dull, since he is only reannouncing plans he announced last September, despite all the fuss.

The worst one has to be, of course, his plans to introduce a written constitution. I can't think of anything more damaging than a new Prime Minister with only a few years (for certain) to make his mark embarking on an ill-advised ego-inspired demolition the UK's constitutional settlement.

As we grow ever nearer the end of the process to separate the Law Lords from the House of Lords, creating a 12-man "Supreme Court", you have to ask, if we're going to have a written Constitution and an elected second chamber as well, why don't we just pledge allegiance to the bloody flag and have done with it?

Having a written constitution, even a bare bones one, is an indisputable mistake. We simply don't need it. Written constitutions are for new countries in need of an operational framework. The U.S. Constitution has shown us many lessons of why we shouldn't have something like that:

• How often does their constitution get amended? It's taken 200 years for the smallest incremental steps to take place. For example, compare the Dunblane Massacre of 1996 over here with the recent mass murder at Virginia Tech University over there. The right to bear arms is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. Here, it took barely a year to have guns banned and, despite not solving all of the problems of gun crime, we haven't had another incident on that scale. It's a simple fact that written constitutions can make passing legislation slower and harder.
• Disproportionate power would be given to the judiciary if our newly made Supreme Court is to be the deciding body on what the constitution does and does not say, as it is in the U.S.
  
• Who gets to write this Constitution? It will inevitably be a document of some controversy and not everyone will agree to its terms. Does any one politician, judge, or indeed Prime Minister, really have the right to be the decider of the entire length and breadth of our values, at a time when the mandate to govern is so flimsy considering how few bother to go out and vote nowadays? This problem is doubly true of an arguably unelected Prime Minister, as Gordon Brown will be. A more unsuitable premier to bring about such a monumental change I can't imagine.
  
• A written constitution safeguards the values of today, not tomorrow. For example, 200 years ago, slavery was perfectly permissible, and hence it was enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. It took an incredible amount of time and hard work to get that overturned. The scars of this struggle still exist today. My point is, the values of our nation will grow and change as time goes by, and we have no right to straight-jacket future generations.

The only way a written constitution would work here would be to have the process of amendment be made very straightforwards. In which case, what's the point of it? Our current unenshrined constitution is the fluid movement of values, capable of incorporating both precedent and other documents like the Magna Carta's edicts and the Human Rights Act with relative ease.

To force upon us a written constitution would be nothing more than an act of vanity on the part of Gordon Brown; his own little guaranteed footnote in the history books. Quite a selfish start to his premiership, I have to say.