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Recently there have been a few articles emanating from Conservative circles with regard to the

Parliamentary sovereignty means that law is made, and if necessary unmade, by elected Members, who are democratically accountable to the people.

balance of power between Parliament and the judges. This trickle of comment from conservatives is in all probability in order to prepare the ground for the introduction of a new Bill of Rights which is the conclusion reached in the latest episode presented by Nick Herbert MP Shadow Secretary of State for Justice, writing on ConservativeHome

Mr Herbert says the independence of the judiciary is an absolute prerequisite for the rule of law but the independence of the judiciary is under threat from Government attempts to fetter judges and judges are also being drawn into political decisions.

It is quite simply staggering that a leading member of the Conservative party could write over 1800 words about our constitutional settlement, the balance of power between parliament and the judiciary and yet fail to mention the EU. Especially when this omission totally undermines the whole premise of Mr Herbert’s argument.

When he says “We should not be handing essentially political decisions over to the courts” and “Parliamentary sovereignty means that law is made, and if necessary unmade, by elected Members, who are democratically accountable to the people.”

He is describing a situation which no longer exists, because in the main our law is no longer made in Parliament and much of our law cannot be unmade by Parliament, in fact our Parliament has very little to do with most of the law that applies to us.

A fact that is not missed by some of our law lords two of whom are mentioned by Mr Herbert:

Lord Steyn has described the principle of parliamentary sovereignty as “a construct of the common law” and suggested that a different constitutional hypothesis may apply in future. Lord Hope has gone further to suggest that “the English principle of absolute legislative sovereignty of Parliament … is being qualified“. Both of these learned gentlemen have made it clear that parliamentary sovereignty is something which cannot survive in the present political climate, you cannot qualify or apply a different constitutional hypothesis to parliamentary sovereignty it is either sovereign or it is not.

Given (as I have mentioned a few times) that Parliament itself has just voted down an amendment in the Lisbon Treaty bill that would have settled the issue and made it quite clear that the British Parliament is supreme;

Notwithstanding any provision of the European Communities Act 1972, nothing in this Act shall affect or be construed by any court in the United Kingdom as affecting the supremacy of the United Kingdom Parliament.

With only forty Conservatives MPs who in defiance of the Tory whip voted for Bill Cash’s Supremacy of Parliament amendment, not by the way including Mr Herbert.

It is detestable for the Conservative Shadow Secretary of State for Justice, to complain about the Supremacy of Parliament being under threat, only a couple of weeks after their own MPs had to disobey a party whip in order to support that supremacy. Exactly what has happened in the interim to have caused this shift in the conservative leadership’s position? Well nothing really, so the conclusion can only be that the Conservative leadership including Mr Herbert cannot really be at all worried about parliamentary sovereignty, or is foremost duty to legislate on behalf of the British people, otherwise the leadership would want to protect parliamentary sovereignty from all directions, not just against our own judges.

All that is needed to restore Parliamentary Sovereignty is a simple bill that states the British Parliament is Sovereign in all cases and that no laws will have any effect on the British citizens or be considered by British Courts unless they have been passed through our both houses of our own Parliament.

What the leadership is suggesting ie. a new Bill of Rights will not in any case have the effect of restoring Parliamentary Sovereignty and will not have any effect on controlling the EU or its ongoing integration .

The Conservative Taskforce on democracy chaired by Europhile Ken Clarke; sees considerable merit in its proposal for a ‘yellow card’: if a third of national parliaments raised an objection to a proposal on subsidiarity grounds, then the EU Commission would be forced to reconsider.

Where is on earth is the protection of Parliamentary sovereignty in that suggestion; firstly we would have to work within the EU system to gather enough backing in order to allow us to put up an objection, then the Commission is entirely free to reconsider and then reject the objection and carry on as before.

As the Labour party is also suggesting a new Bill of Rights, we must assume that the political elites are up to something which they wish to keep hidden from us. As in all things the devil is in the details, and the rest is just spin for public consumption.

It is far to easy to agree that our Parliamentarians have usurped our Constitution and used it to their own ends, so we should do something to rebalance the situation but when those same Parliamentarians get together to offer us a cure in a new Bill of Rights, I think we ought to examine their proposals with a great deal of suspicion.

Because the danger is that a new Bill of Rights will institutionalise the advances already made in the destruction of the British National state as a sovereign entity, install the ECHR and the EU Charta of Fundamental Rights, as the overriding considerations in our own constitutional settlement and confirm the present unacceptable situation where we the people are finding it increasingly difficult to hold our law makers to account.