Brown's statement to the House today has opened a new constitutional moment in the nation's political life - one of those defining moments when the way power is managed is opened up for contestation because the status quo has broken down. The question is, in whose interests and by what principles will it be shaped? As the Power Commission's Vice Chair, Ferdy Mount, eloquently puts it, constitutional reforms are so often 'cynical manoeuvres for power decked in the bunting of high principle'. While these moments of constitutional rupture emerge because the status quo is no longer an option, what replaces the old order is not necessarily a more just or democratic one.

Yet there are grounds for hoping that Brown may have ushered in a genuinely democratic constitutional moment, rather than another (archetypically) British attempt to devolve power in order to retain it. The basis of this hope resides not solely in the sweeping changes he set out today to humble executive power, but also in the very fact that a political incumbent is heeding the call from those outside, recognising that democracy is part of the solution to the ills of democracy. Democratic reformers should never cease quoting Brown's Jeffersonian-inspired words back at him if, or when, he deviates from the path he has himself set out today: 'the best answer to disengagement from our democracy is to strengthen our democracy'.

The question is now whether this constitutional moment will lead to a sustainable solution, one that not only meets needs which can no longer be ignored, but forwards the democratic ideal itself. The tone and priority Brown has given to the relationship between citizen and state, as well executive and parliament, has given us reasons to be hopeful. Yet this requires not only the holistic institutional reform proposed in today's Green paper, but a process of citizen-inclusive change owned not by any party, or any even the political class as a whole, but the people themselves. The challenge is how we can let 'the people' in all their diversity speak in a way that links their voice into a fair and sustainable constitutional settlement. It's now time for democratic campaigners, philosophers, historians and practitioners to illuminate, contest and construct the mechanisms and processes that can turn the democratically desirable into the practically feasible.