We have sacrificed our noble sovereignty on the altar of the EU Empire

Yahoo

24-05-2025

The sovereignty of our Parliament is our democracy. It is fundamental to our freedoms – for which people fought and died as we commemorated in the VE celebrations. This is why I fought with real Conservative colleagues on the back benches over many decades. One of the most futile comments ever made was 'Brexit means Brexit'. Brexit was the restoration of self-government in a real democracy, fundamentally different from law-making in the EU. Leaving the EU was a constitutional and democratic revolution (with unfinished business within grasp), and is comparable to the historic Restoration of Charles II in 1660.
Committed Remainers within Parliament, smarting at their defeat in the 2016 referendum, and those within the hidden recesses of the Establishment and civil service, obstructed the legislative requirements of Brexit and opened the door to the current situation. This obstruction included the Chequers debacle necessitating the removal of Theresa May, then the parliamentary paralysis against Boris Johnson when the Remainers temporarily seized control of the business of the House of Commons until his victorious 2019 Brexit general election. Then followed resistance to the full repeal of EU law and the failure to clearly legislate 'to stop the boats' by not overriding the ECHR, which would have made the Bill 'ironclad'. Rishi Sunak recently admitted he got this wrong.
The overarching sovereignty of Parliament was endorsed, unopposed, by the clear wording of Section 38 of the European Withdrawal Act 2020, 'notwithstanding' any European laws or jurisdiction, then reinforced by the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Act 2023 introduced by Jacob Rees-Mogg and strongly supported through my European Scrutiny Committee.
This sovereignty was reaffirmed recently by the Supreme Court in the Rwanda Judgement (paragraph 144) on the 'principle of legality', in line with the fundamental principles of our unwritten constitution that where a clear and unambiguous statute is passed by our Parliament, it is the duty of our courts to give effect to that statute.
By stark contrast, in the EU, the laws are made by the Council of Ministers behind closed doors by a majority vote of all the member states and without a written transcript as in our daily Hansard. Indeed, under the European Communities Act 1972, we foolishly subjugated ourselves to the supremacy of EU laws and the European Court of Justice. Not once did we ever reject or amend one word of EU law. Listen and watch recordings of what Starmer said in his past repudiations of Brexit. Furthermore, the joint summit statement on May 19 is simply staggering in its duplicity. It refers to 'reaffirming our shared values' and 'our commitment to their full, timely and faithful implementation' whilst re-subjugating us to undemocratic European jurisdiction despite their 'cover' of arbitration. To achieve this in secret, the European Scrutiny Committee – created in 1973 and successively chaired by Labour and Conservative chairmen, and which held the Government, Conservative and Labour, to account on all European lawmaking – was abolished in June 2024 by Starmer in one line, without debate.
This deceitful 'reset' undermines British fishermen. One of the worst aspects of the European Union fishing arrangements during our membership, and hopelessly conceded by Ted Heath, was the dumping of fish to comply with quotas. Now it is the fishermen themselves who have been dumped. On food and agriculture, Britain has agreed to 'dynamic alignment', which is simply legal submission.
The farmers and food and drinks organisations have made it clear that the proposals must not be at any price and must respect our autonomy, knowing that these will give the European Commission massive legal traction, undermining our economic independence in legislating in bioscience, new agricultural technology, gene-­editing, cultivated proteins, and AI itself.
The new energy emissions trading scheme will increase energy costs. The e-gates proposals will make little difference, and the youth mobility scheme raises dangers for further immigration.
How could any government in their right mind possibly want to engage in these undemocratic arrangements? The European Union is a political shambles, an economic subsidy-­driven disaster zone resembling a Ponzi scheme.
On defence and security, with Russian aggression in Ukraine, we are now paying the price for longstanding under-investment in our defence. Some form of defence alliance within the framework of Nato remains essential, but not the dangerously byzantine control-and-command proposals of Pesco.
Aping Harold Wilson's economic playbook in the 1975 EU referendum, these arrangements are a sell-out. To add insult to injury, not only are we to pay for all this, but Ursula von der Leyen pretended that the Government should enter these arrangements because, as she and Starmer have cynically said, Britain is a 'sovereign country'. This is classic, devious Monnet-­style tactics endorsed by a Eurofanatic cohort. This is an unconstitutional deal undermining our newly regained sovereignty, which is the bastion of our democracy, our Parliament and our freedoms.
Bill Cash was Chair of the European Scrutiny Committee between 2010 and 2024 and Shadow Attorney General between 2001 and 2003
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