European Union Bill

I fully accept that my right hon. and hon. Friends on the Front Bench have attempted to take a step in the right direction. However, by the advice that they have accepted and their framing of the clause, they have not achieved the objective or made any progress, and they may have set us back. To put it bluntly, if clause 18 is all that Parliament has to say about its sovereignty, that is an invitation for the judges to come for us, as I shall explain. Although sovereignty in the German written constitution lies in German basic law, Germany has the advantage of a constitutional court, which has always reasserted its right to determine whether European Community law is compatible with German basic law. Some of us have asked for some years why we do not have the same constitutional protection. We do not, and a sovereignty Act or clause was therefore deemed to be necessary. That is how some of us persuaded the leader of the Conservative party to make that an important part of his leadership election. Where does sovereignty lie in the EU? Obviously, the origins lie in the member states, but over the years and from early on, the European Court of Justice began to lay claim to sovereignty. Back in 1963, in the Van Gend en Loos case, the European Court of Justice laid claim to a new legal order, whereby member states had subjugated certain delegated powers to the collective good, over which the European Union would claim supremacy. The doctrine was developed in the Factortame case, in which a UK court, with an obligation to implement European Community law, finished up overturning an Act of Parliament. At the time, one had to pinch oneself. Before that date, one could not imagine that one of our domestic courts could do such a thing, but it did.