Withdrawing Britain from the ECHR and giving police powers to ban marches might seem like pragmatic responses to intractable challenges, but overloaded executive power can quickly become unstoppable, writes Carlos Alba.

Nothing says school to me like Banda machines, the hand-operated copiers that produced replicas of the teacher’s notes on smooth, waxy sheets of paper.

These antediluvian contraptions used a carbon-coated master sheet, a drum and a felt pad soaked in raw alcohol whose smell, to this day, reminds me of the late-night cramming sessions for my O’Grade exams.

It was on one of these sheets that I first learned about the separation of powers – the three, autonomous institutions of a properly functioning liberal democracy, whose independence is necessary to prevent an abusive accumulation of power by the executive. Yawn – time to smoke another Embassy Regal out of the bathroom window.

To a 15-year-old schoolboy with zero experience of life, such distinctions seemed dry and painfully academic. Sure, in the old days, like in the 1930s or something, there might have been bad guys who did bad things in other countries.

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But this was Britain, where everything was set in stone and where everyone always did the right thing. Its institutions of state had evolved seamlessly over time and, barring a few hiccups, peacefully.

As we were constantly reminded while studying 19th and 20th European century history, while the rest of the continent was convulsed with revolution, its borders constantly drawn and redrawn, we stood as a rock of stability and, for the most part, democratic dependability.

Those lessons have remained true to this day. Since I was at school in the early 1980s democracy has, if anything, been strengthened in the UK, with new devolved institutions, city mayors and elected police and........

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