Tuesday 5 June 2018

The sovereignty of our parliament.


Our first demand is that the people must be recognized as sovereign, so what does this actually mean?

The Royal powers of our sovereign monarch, were finally removed by the Bill of Rights 1689. The Bill of Rights also removed the ability of the Crown to dispense with or ignore legislation and statutes. Such a right had culminated in the Declaration of Indulgence of 1687, which had ushered in the Glorious Revolution. That led the Earl of Shaftesbury to declare in 1689, "The Parliament of England is that supreme and absolute power, which gives life and motion to the English government" Finally The Act of Settlement of 1700 removed royal power over the judiciary and defined a vote of both houses as the sole method of removing a judge.

Therefore our Parliament is the supreme legal authority in the UK, which can create or end any law. Generally, the courts cannot overrule its legislation and no Parliament can pass laws that future Parliaments cannot change. Parliamentary sovereignty is the most important part of the UK constitution. As a result what one government passes can be changed by another and so, as a purely hypothetical example,  there would be nothing stopping any future government applying to re-join the EU.

This why our first demand, on which the other five depend, is so important and demands that we ‘the people’ must be recognised as sovereign so that it is only through our consent that constitutional changes can be made and this would all be set out within a new written constitution which is of course our sixth and final demand.

Sovereignty or power once rested with the monarch and now resides with our parliament and there is no good reason why it should not be moved again so as to recognise the people as sovereign. All we have to do is get enough of us to demand this to happen.


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