Why hasn't the UK Parliament used its limitless power to halt immigration?

Parliament can do ANYTHING.

Since 1688 the monarchy has been brought into Parliament; and since the nineteenth and twentieth century Reform Acts all the common people have gained admittance through their representatives, so that the two Houses of Westminster now embody the British nation as a whole.

This is ‘power to the people’, absolute and unhindered.

As a layman I did not understand the full extent of Parliament’s might until I heard Sir Bill Cash on Monday. He explained that unlike Germany and the Netherlands, our Constitution does not acknowledge the supremacy of international law. If we wish to override it all we have to do is pass an Act that says so in terms; a key phrase is ‘notwithstanding [name of law, convention, treaty].’

Sir Bill said that the Supreme Court has already upheld this approach in case law. If the wording is sufficiently clear and explicit then no judge can oppose it.

So for example to stop the ‘boat people’ completely we could make a law permanently barring anyone from claiming asylum if they have arrived without prior agreement. It is not necessary for us to withdraw from the ECHR as a whole; we could just expressly override it in this instance. That would stop the faux-refugee-smuggling in its tracks (even though that is a mere flea-bite compared to the general, permitted inrush.)

So why didn’t the last Government do it? Did they fear the mass media’s slurs; or were they simply incompetent and ill-advised?

Did their civil servants not know of this legal power? Or did they know, but kept the knowledge to themselves? Sir Bill says that they are often not civil and not servants, and moots a Civil Service Reform Act to bring them back into line.

Or does the sabotage come from courts and the Government’s legal advisers? In the 2011 debate on the European Union Bill, Cash remarked:


The courts, on a range of matters, have accumulated greater and greater influence, and, indeed, action, in relation to their judgments on Acts of Parliament. I refer not merely to interpretation or construction of the words but the underlying judicial activism, sometimes of a quasi-political nature.

‘Freedom is frightening’ was the title of an LP by Stomu Yamash'ta in 1973, the year in which we began to drift into the nets of the European project. Freedom needs watchdogs to prevent such gradual encroachments on our scary, amazing liberty; in the 2011 debate Sir Bill was proposing the insertion of these words:

‘The sovereignty of the United Kingdom Parliament in relation to EU law is hereby reaffirmed.’

We need markers like that to stop Lilliputian entanglement by conceited and subversive lawyers who think they know what is good for us, or at least for themselves. Law is downstream of power, and that power should flow not from barristers’ chambers but the debating chambers of Westminster.

According to Wikipedia Sir Bill ‘has been described by Kenneth Clarke as the most "Eurosceptic" Member of Parliament.’ That was a nice bit of spinning from the corporatist Right; a better term would be ‘democratic.’

But the corporatist Left hates Parliamentary sovereignty, too. The Brown/Starmer scheme aims to devolve power away from Westminster to cities and regions, and we know from Scotland, London and other places where that leads.

Parliament’s defenders are neither Right nor Left. See the community on this subject between someone like Sir Bill and Left orators such as Dennis Skinner, George Galloway and the late Tony Benn. Opposition to Brexit is opposition to the people, from those who would like to say, as the egregiously arrogant German Annalena Baerbock did, ‘no matter what my voters think.’

The full sovereignty we have is a two-edged sword. For good or ill, we have to endure what the current administration plans for us, legitimised by a freakish electoral result. What is done can be undone later, though the interim cost and damage may be enormous.

Meantime we need to reform the seat of our commonly held power. The weak element in our national trinity is the representation of the common people. How do we discipline or even dismiss early those MPs who feel free to ignore the wishes and best interests of their constituents? What system of voting would better reflect the electoral support in a constituency, and how could that proposed system be defended from powerful, self-interested joint PR attacks on it by both major parties as we saw in the 2011 referendum on the Alternative Vote?

After the Labour interregnum we look forward to the restoration and refurbishment of ‘1688 and all that’ so that ‘democracy does not come to a .’

Reposted from Bruges Group Blog