Sir Bernard Jenkin
MP for Harwich and North Essex · Conservative · United Kingdom
“Despite long and historic disagreements between successive UK Governments and Israel, it has remained a steadfast ally in counter-terrorist efforts to keep our people safe in this country. We are now embarked, it seems, on a full diplomatic dispute with Israel and tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats.”
“I would very much have liked to have discussed the medical devices questions arising from the Bill. The Minister made an incredibly short speech about that important matter. It is quite clear that these provisions are part of the covert dynamic alignment with the EU and the covert rejoin agenda being pursued by the Government.”
“I am as keen as anybody to get on with discussing the Health Bill, but this topic is too serious an opportunity to miss, given that the hon. Member for Leeds Central and Headingley (Alex Sobel) has raised such important issues. I really commend his speech and his initiative. Everybody should read it.”
“The Minister shakes her head, but she is yet to give a good reason as to why this measure is in the Bill. When we had an Adjournment debate in July with the then Minister for patient safety, the hon.”
“The chief executive of the CQC is wantonly conflicted in terms of looking after the safe space, so he cannot be the one left in charge of that function. The real point here is that we are missing the opportunity to save so much money. Governments keep having public inquiries.”
“I asked the Minister, in a letter I sent her after the debate in July, to give us the information on how much the transfer of all this would cost. Nothing has arrived. I never had a reply to the letter. Of course, the Government have changed the Minister and the new Minister for patient safety, the right hon.”
The complete record
Every one of 4,591 lines we hold for Sir Bernard Jenkin, in date order, each linked to its source. Free to read, in full, without an account. Page 32 of 92.
“Friend made it clear that his support for the Government on this issue “should not and must not be taken as an acceptance of clause 11 as it stands.” That demonstrates the fact that, while my hon. Friends representing Scottish constituencies take the Conservative Whip, they demonstrate an independence of mind and work with their colleagues in the Scottish Parliament, whom I met recently on a visit to the Scottish Parliament, along with Scottish Conservative and Scottish National party Members, to discuss clause 11. My hon. Friend also made it clear that the legislative consent motions might not be granted for clause 11 as it stands.”
“One could suggest that people in glass houses should not throw stones. I do not know which part of the Labour party he represents, but they come in diverse characters these days. Is he in that part of the party that supports its leadership, or the part that is trying to get rid of it? Is he part of Momentum or against it? I do not know whether he is living in fear of deselection. The one thing we do know about him, however, is that he is subject to the Labour Whip. It is not unusual for members of a governing party to be subject to a single Whip, but I think he undervalued the highly significant speech made by my hon. Friend the Member for East Renfrewshire (Paul Masterton). My hon.”
“Sir David, thank you for calling me at this stage of the debate. To be fair to the hon. and learned Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry), I think she was chafing against the Act of Union, which, as she correctly described, established a unitary market. The Act of Union banned tariffs between Scotland and England and established the free movement of goods. I commend the use of the word “trust” by the hon. Member for Edinburgh South (Ian Murray), which he used regularly, but I question whether he is in fact doing much to promote trust, as this debate needs to do. He talked about heading into a constitutional crisis, but I think he did so to create a sense of distrust. I was also disappointed when the hon. Gentleman questioned the motives of my hon. Friends who represent Scottish constituencies.”
“Usually, when devolved powers are going to be legislated for in this House, there is a great deal of discussion, large numbers of papers are produced in all parts of the United Kingdom and eventually, a piece of legislation emerges with a degree of consensus around it. This Bill emerged in much shorter order. We are told that there was very little discussion about the contents of clause 11. This underlines how, under strain, the reflex of our constitutional habits is not to consult. We in the United Kingdom Parliament, and those of us who support United Kingdom Governments, in the plural, have to recognise that there is a serious gap in our capability to discuss, explore, befriend and understand each other throughout the United Kingdom.”
“That followed meetings that we held in Edinburgh, which will be followed by further meetings in Cardiff and Edinburgh, and if we can get to Northern Ireland, we will. What was striking about the meetings in Cardiff and Holyrood was how little this kind of interchange takes place, how slenderly we know other individuals in other Parliaments throughout the United Kingdom, and how there are no formal mechanisms for proper exchange between the four Parliaments of the United Kingdom. What a shortage that is! This debate is less about leaving the European Union and more about devolution. It is about reconciling competing narratives of what devolution in the United Kingdom has come to mean, and about dealing with the lack of trust we have inherited from the present devolution settlement. The debate about clause 11 reflects that.”
“I am sorry, I did not realise that I was saying anything particularly provocative— [ Interruption. ] Yes, there was a referendum, but the constitutional reality has turned into something much more federal in character than the proponents of the original legislation told us it would be. I do not want to detain the Committee for long. I have chosen to speak in the debate because I am the Chair of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, which is looking at the relationships between the four Governments and Parliaments of the United Kingdom. We issued a report on inter-institutional relations earlier this year, in the previous Parliament, and we issued an interim report just last week on clause 11.”
“The hon. Gentleman has been in this House for quite some time, and he should be used to that by now. That is the way in which Governments have tended to behave. Yes, we have tried to improve things. We now have pre-legislative scrutiny, for example. I did not vote for the Lisbon treaty, which put article 50 into the treaties. I did not vote to have a two-year time limit on the negotiations on leaving the European Union. I suspect that the hon. Gentleman did vote for the Lisbon treaty, however, so I think he should take more responsibility than I should for the time constraints under which we are now operating.”
“Incidentally, the report we published last week is an interim report. We produced no conclusions or recommendations, but we wanted to surface and discuss many of the pieces of evidence that we have received and make them available for this debate.”
“I do not accept that the Bill is in any kind of a mess. I think that we ought to keep the effects of clause 11 in proportion. From the perspective of the Government—and, in reality, from the perspective of what actually happens in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland—the clause is a status quo measure. The powers, while not reserved by the Scotland Acts, were reserved by virtue of our membership of the European Union, so there is no power grab. If the hon. Gentleman wants me to, I can quote from the evidence that the Committee received from Mr Nigel Smith. He was the chairman of Scotland Forward, which ran the pro-devolution campaign in 1997. He stated: “Nobody who voted for the Scottish Parliament exactly twenty years ago need worry—there is no ‘power grab’ underway.” We did receive countervailing evidence.”
“The EU itself operates substantially on the basis of shared competences and, paradoxically, it is leaving the EU that is exposing the flaws in the devolution settlement. There are so few mechanisms for dealing with shared competences—virtually none.”
“The hon. Gentleman will be surprised no longer, because my next point is that the manner of clause 11 reflects a lack of sensitivity on these matters. Clause 11 suggests that there will be no time limits on the retention of powers and no process for the discussion of how powers should be handed over. There is only consultation through the JMC, which meets sporadically, and there is no statement of long-term aims for where the powers should eventually lie. Returning to the hon. Member for Edinburgh South and his comments about trust, we should be asking how we can build some trust. The great gap in the devolution settlement, as it exists, is that it is based on a binary notion of what devolution means: power is either reserved or devolved. In fact, most decentralised systems of government have shared competences.”
“I do agree, but the number of times that the JMC and its sub-committees have met formally is few. Months can go by with no meetings, and then a Whitehall Minister will say, “Ooh, we should have one.” That does not inspire confidence. Perhaps the JMC should have fixed diarised formal meetings every year, because there would be things to discuss whether or not a Minister of the Crown here actually thinks there might, and that would give people an opportunity to get to know each other better.”
“I could not agree more, but I hope that the hon. Gentleman will acknowledge—I am not being accusatory—that this has been a failure of previous Governments as well as this one. When the Select Committee visited the Welsh Assembly and the Welsh Government during the 2010 Parliament, First Minister Carwyn Jones actually complained to us, perhaps with more rhetoric than was justified, that he had been trying to get a meeting with Prime Minister David Cameron for months and months—more than a year—but had not been allowed to have one. We need fewer excuses for people who want to be destructive and more confidence that meetings will take place and that they are valued by all parties.”
“SNP colleagues talk about the natural sovereignty of the Scottish people, but the legal constitutional reality is that the Queen in Parliament in Westminster is still absolutely sovereign. Those things need to aired, discussed and understood.”
“I have an open mind on that, and I have fiddled around with my amendments, which have not appeared on the order paper today, to see whether we can find a way of doing that. I do not know whether this is the right Bill through which to do that—probably not—but such things are statutory in other decentralised systems. There clearly needs to be something much more formal, but we should perhaps experiment without statute first to see whether it is necessary. My Committee took evidence from one civil servant and a former Speaker’s Counsel who said, “It has worked very well for the past 300 years, so why do we need statute?” but that does not recognise that we now have competing political centres with, I repeat, competing narratives about what the constitution actually is.”
“I hear the hon. Lady’s impatience, but we need to be more patient. We are not completing the consideration of this Bill this evening, and I am encouraged by the work done by the First Secretary of State, who chaired the last meeting of the Joint Ministerial Committee and seemed to be drawing people together around some agreed principles for how joint frameworks might be approached. We all want to see that, so let us hope that that work will continue.”
“For example, the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee and the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee have competences that are shared by Committees in different Parliaments. Those Committees should be meeting regularly together. Another suggestion worthy of consideration is that there should be some formal inter-parliamentary council in the United Kingdom to allow representatives of all four Parliaments to meet on a regular basis on some kind of neutral ground.”
“The better we know each other, the more we will forgive each other for the rhetoric. That is what I found when my Committee went to Edinburgh on a semi-formal visit. The hon. Member for Inverclyde (Ronnie Cowan) and I, as Chairman, had some open and frank discussions about some difficult issues with people I had never even met before, but we of course found that there was lots of common ground. My next point is that there are no inter-parliamentary arrangements. We had to scrabble around for a bit of budget to do the trip. We found it in the end, but there needs to be a habit of people in this Parliament interacting much more openly and frequently with our counterparts in the other Parliaments.”
“Sir David, am I to be tempted to enter a debate on today’s negotiations, or should we wait until tomorrow, when perhaps someone will come to tell the House something about what has been going on? A formal inter-parliamentary council that meets on a regular basis would be another opportunity for parliamentarians to understand each other better.”
“I wonder whether there is a case for the Government convening some kind of standing commission, under the scrutiny of a joint group of parliamentarians, to dispassionately look through the powers returning from the EU that intersect with the devolved Parliaments and Assemblies in order to determine what powers should lie where, both immediately as we leave the European Union and in the longer term. At the moment, I am afraid my criticism of clause 11, as it stands, is that it does not give any assurance about process or much assurance about consultation, time limits or sun-setting. It just sets out this static proposal.”
“I am endeavouring to raise the tone of this debate, and obviously I am not succeeding with certain Opposition Members. My final suggestion goes to the heart of what clause 11 is about. I mentioned that, in previous discussions about devolution, there has always been a Silk commission or a Calman commission. There has always been a body that has deliberated, drawn out the more controversial politics and tried to make the discussion more objective.”
“I will not give way again. I have said everything I want to say. My Committee is continuing its inquiry. If any right hon. or hon. Member wants to have their say, they can always submit evidence to our Committee.”
“I am most grateful to the hon. Lady for giving way—I know she is trying to get on with her speech. Yes, we published the conclusions of the last Joint Ministerial Committee in our report because they, I think, do show the good faith of the Government. However, I also understand why people have doubted the good faith of the Government—because clause 11 is so bald, if I may say so. We need reassurances around clause 11 that do not necessarily change the substance of it but give assurance that there will be a process and a timetable. That would certainly be a good step.”
“My right hon. Friend inadvertently says that the registers would be 22 years old, but he meant to say that the boundaries will be based on registers that are 22 years old. The registers will actually be completely up to date.”
“I could not support the Bill as it stands, but I do regret that the Conservative party has become impaled on this commitment to reduce the number of MPs in the House of Commons, because I do not see colleagues in any part of the House hanging around without enough to do. I also regret all the more the fact that this reduction will result in a de facto increase in Government patronage relative to the size of the House. If we could have a fresh boundary review, keep 650 MPs, get that done in good time for a 2022 election and allow for a 5% variation against the electoral quota, I would hazard a guess that the majority in this House would settle for that. It would help the House to continue to meet the challenge of our workload, be less disruptive and, at least as importantly, not covertly increase the patronage of Governments in this House.”
“More significantly, in today’s House, paid Ministers represent 30% of Conservative MPs. In a reduced House, with an equivalent balance between the parties, that would increase to 33%—one third of all the Government’s MPs would be paid by the Government. We are meant to be against bribery and corruption in this place, but that is a way of controlling what MPs do. PASC’s suggestions for reducing the number of Ministers in the Commons included reducing the absolute number of Ministers or appointing a larger proportion of Ministers from outside the Commons, by increasing the proportion of Ministers from the other place or by appointing Ministers who are not Members of either House—it is only a convention that Ministers are Members of Parliament.”
“That has become a pathway to becoming a Minister, and there are a great number of such people who play a very valuable role. There is therefore no lack of capacity for Prime Ministers to influence and control Departments. That is not a reason to maintain the number of Ministers in the House of Commons. A reduction in the size of the House of Commons by a little under 8% would require a reduction in the number of Ministers in the House of Commons by just seven, but I think that that is an important principle. Should we make that a condition of implementing the 2018 boundaries review of 600 seats? I leave that question hanging in the air. If the reduction is made without reducing the number of Ministers, the percentage of MPs who are Ministers rises from 14.6% to 15.8%.”
“The number of Ministers is already subject to two statutory limits: the House of Commons Disqualification Act 1975, which limits the number of Ministers who can sit and vote in the House of Commons to 95, and the Ministerial and Other Salaries Act 1975, known as MOSA, which limits the number of ministerial salaries that can be paid to 109. Of course, that does not limit prime ministerial patronage in other ways. Neither Act covers Parliamentary Private Secretaries, unpaid Whips and other informal appointments, such as envoys or party appointments. Nor does MOSA limit the number of unpaid Ministers who can sit in the other place. There is also the question of the growth of a new breed of quasi-Minister, which comes from the appointment of non-executive directors of ministerial Departments.”
“However, as has already been pointed out, the most significant impact is on the independence of the legislature because it increases the relative size of the payroll vote. Those who hold a Government job are expected to vote with the Government or to resign, and the increase in the number of Ministers undermines the ability of the legislature to scrutinise the Government and to hold them to account. If we are going to reject this Bill and cut the size of the House of Commons, let us all agree at least that the number of Ministers should be reduced pro rata so that the ratio does not get any worse. In 2011, PASC recommended that the reduction in number of MPs from 650 to 600 should be accompanied by a corresponding reduction in the number of Ministers.”
“In 2010, the ratio of Ministers to Members of the House of Commons was 1:8, compared with 1:14 in Spain, 1:16 in Germany and 1:29 in France. The increase in the number of Ministers has several detrimental effects. I appreciate that this is not a popular topic among MPs these days, most of whom hope for ministerial preferment and regard it as more likely if there are more jobs that the Prime Minister has to fill, but it has obviously been one of the reasons the number of Ministers has increased. However, there are downsides. The number of Ministers adds to the cost of politics. More Ministers make decision making across Government more complicated. Why has the Cabinet tended to grow and grow? That blurs lines of accountability.”
“A PASC report under my predecessor as Chair, Tony Wright, raised concerns about the numbers of Ministers in Government and the impact of those numbers on the size of the payroll vote and on the independence of the legislature. That 2010 report was entitled “Too Many Ministers?”. It noted how the number of Ministers had grown steadily since 1900, doubling from 60 to 120, with the rate of increase particularly marked for Ministers below Cabinet level. Evidence submitted by the constitution unit to PASC for its further inquiry in 2011 “Smaller Government: What do Ministers do?” showed that the House of Commons has a larger number of Ministers in relation to its size than is the case in many other European countries.”
“There was very little new legislation every year and far fewer public bodies. The workload of the House of Commons has vastly increased, to the extent that the vast majority of hon. and right hon. Members are now full-time, or virtually full-time, parliamentarians. We spend less time on primary legislation than we used to, but we barely look at the thousands of statutory instruments that pass through this House, which have increased from around 2,000 per year in the 1950s to 3,000 or more per year more recently, and Brexit means there will be more. If we are not going to stick to the present size of the House of 650 MPs, the 2011 Act, which reduces the size of the House from 650 to 600, sits ill on our statute book, unless we also address the consequences for the number of Ministers.”
“I think that is a false comparison, simply because the House of Lords is not elected—we are the only elected part of this Parliament. The French Assemblée Nationale has 577 Members for a similar- sized population, but there is also an elected Senate of 348 Members, so there are 925 elected parliamentarians serving the whole of France. We do not have a comparable number in this House, and do not plan to, even with 650 Members. The number of MPs in the House of Commons has not been below 600 since 1800, when our population was considerably smaller than it is today. After the Republic of Ireland seceded from the UK in 1921, the number dropped to 615, but that was when the Government were spending well under 30% of GDP, with much of that on foreign affairs and defence. There was little welfare and no NHS.”
“A failure to resolve disagreements amicably can quickly become toxic, as we are seeing in the debate over clause 11 of the EU withdrawal Bill. Moreover, disputes will be resolved only where there is trust and understanding between individual Ministers from each Administration and between MPs from each of the Parliaments. We need to get to know each other better, and we need more regular meetings, but at present there is no provision in any budget for this to take place. Such institutional machinery will take up the time and energy of Ministers and MPs, and will be permanently required, as we see is common in other decentralised nations. Now is not the time to be reducing parliamentary capacity. My right hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean referred to the fact that this House is one of the largest lower Houses.”
“A PACAC report produced just this week, “Devolution and Exiting the EU and Clause 11 of the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill: Issues for Consideration”, highlights how we have previously tended to consider devolution as a binary question—powers are either reserved or devolved—but as we prepare to take back powers on matters such as agriculture, fisheries management and environmental protection, we find that there are powers we have to share among Westminster, Holyrood, Cardiff Bay and Stormont but for which there is precious little inter- governmental or inter-parliamentary machinery—in fact, there is no inter-parliamentary machinery. This machinery is necessary, however, if we are to provide the reassurance and proper procedures for resolving and scrutinising disagreements.”
“First, this devolution of primary legislative powers applies only to a relatively small part of the population—there is no devolution of legislative powers in England, which accounts for 85% of the UK’s population, and therefore no meaningful reduction in the responsibilities at least of English MPs. Secondly, the present size of the House already reflects a reduction in representation in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Thirdly, it is becoming apparent that devolution in the UK is far from finished business.”
“We have heard in evidence to PACAC and in this House how Brexit means that parts of Government are having to increase their resources to manage responsibilities being repatriated from the EU. This will give MPs more responsibilities and powers as well, not fewer: more UK Government activity to scrutinise, more areas of policy to consider that are the direct responsibility of the Government, and of course more legislation. As we leave the EU, PACAC is also conducting an inquiry into the consequences for devolution in the UK, and this is leading me to change my view on the wisdom of reducing the number of MPs in the House of Commons, because Westminster has devolved some of its powers.”
“Friend the Member for Forest of Dean—in the tangle of his rather long speech, this was by far the most important point—that we cannot jump at this opportunity to change the legislation until we can be certain that cancelling the current boundary review will not cause other unsurmountable and practical problems or too much cost and uncertainty. I can assure him and the Minister that PACAC will be taking evidence from the boundary commissions in the new year and asking them for clear advice on this question, and I am sure that in doing so we will want to pick up on many of the points raised in today’s debate. On the size of the House of Commons, I am actually rather sympathetic to the retention of 650 constituencies.”
“Current legislation provides for exceptions, such as the four island constituencies and the geographically very large constituencies, and the Bill accepts them as well, but not the 5% rule, even though it has been accepted in nearly every other part of the country. Perhaps the Labour supporters of the Bill prefer 7.5% over 5% because they believe that it might advantage their party. I fully accept that my party is keen on 5%, but that is only because it reduces potential unfair electoral disadvantage. It cannot be argued that we have made the electoral system less fair. On the use of more up-to-date electoral data, I have considerably more sympathy with the Bill. The fresher the data, the better. That said, I take the point made by my right hon.”
“Those of us who have coastal constituencies are innocent bystanders to some of the turbulence that affects inland constituencies. We should sympathise, however. The point made by the hon. Member for Birmingham, Perry Barr (Mr Mahmood), who is not in his place, is not to be dismissed, because we like to be elected and to serve as leaders of our communities, and if those communities are not coherent, that makes it more difficult. But let us be absolutely clear: that is an ancillary purpose of being elected a Member of Parliament; our primary job is to represent the national interest and our constituents in Parliament, not to represent Parliament in our constituencies. Sometimes in these debates about the role of MPs, we, and others, tend to lose sight of our primary purpose.”
“Unless the Bill’s promoter can somehow argue that 7.5% is actually fairer and therefore would command greater public confidence, he should concede that the 5% deviation should be maintained. Of course, some communities will feel they have been put into the wrong constituency, but that always occurs, whatever the rules say. I can personally be completely neutral on this point. Not only will my constituency be more or less the same after the boundary changes—though, sadly, I will lose the town of Harwich itself—but the constituency that Samuel Pepys represented when he was first elected in 1679 is almost identical to the shape of the one I represent today. [Hon. Members: “Do you keep a diary?”] I am not going to read out my diaries.”
“If one believes in electoral equality and fairness, one should favour the existing 5% provision, which achieves this more effectively than the proposed 7.5% provision would. For demographic reasons, wider disparities in constituency sizes have historically favoured the Labour party in England. The fact that the Bill does not propose returning to the 10% quota deviation, which the Labour party previously supported, implicitly concedes the substance of the equality argument—that the 10% deviation was unfair. The fact that the boundary commissions have mostly completed their recommendations for new boundaries and that they allow only a 5% deviation also confirms that this is perfectly achievable. To propose 7.5% is simply an attempt to turn the clock back from a fairer voting system.”
“It accepts that the size of the House of Commons should be restricted to a defined number, which has never been the case before, to prevent a return to the so-called ratchet effect, whereby the size of the House tended to increase as the population grew; it accepts the primacy of the principle of an electoral quota over any other statutory factor in determining the size of a constituency; and it accepts the 2011 revision of the consultation process and the removal of interim reviews. I ask myself, therefore, why the Bill does not accept that deviations from the quota should be limited to the 5% limit established in the 2011 Act, rather than changing it to a 7.5% allowance.”
“The views I express today are my own, but I approach consideration of the Bill in the spirit of PACAC’s core purpose—namely, “to conduct robust and effective scrutiny in order to help create conditions where the public can have justified confidence in public services/government”. That leads me immediately to express concern about one key provision in the Bill. The House, including my right hon. Friend the Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper), can note with satisfaction that the Bill accepts several key principles established in the Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Act 2011.”
“The remit of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee includes the requirement to consider constitutional matters, and this includes parliamentary elections and boundaries. I draw the House’s attention to the report issued by our predecessor Committee, the Public Administration Select Committee, in the 2010 Parliament, entitled, “Smaller Government: What do Ministers do?”, since it addresses the consequences of reducing the size of the House of Commons for the relationship between the Commons and the Government, as has been touched upon already. I will return to that later.”
“In answer to the hon. Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Gwynne), who accuses us of pursuing political advantage, I would simply point out that we are pursuing a fairer distribution of constituencies, which, even though it might be to our advantage, puts Members on the Government Benches on the moral high ground, rather than defending the present distribution of constituencies, which is clearly unfair. I will come back to that point later. I congratulate the hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton (Afzal Khan) on the Bill, although we all suspect that he might have had some help. The enthusiasm of the Opposition Front-Bench team for the Bill suggests that—well, we all like co-operating with our colleagues in the House, don’t we?”
“Some of these rights are going to be incorporated in different statutes. For example, there is going to be an environment Act, which will create a new regulator and, we hope, protect those rights. Is the present proposal not a very broad brush, which is ill fitted to dealing with these rather detailed matters? Can my right and learned hon. Friend give us some reassurance that Supreme Court judges will not be left dealing with more legal uncertainty, rather than less, because they will have to adjudicate between two different rights regimes—one that is directly applicable from our own statute, and the other where they may have to declare an incompatibility with European convention rights? How will that diminish legal uncertainty, which is what Supreme Court judges are looking for?”
“May I refer my hon. Friend to clause 5(2)? My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr Grieve), in his rather amazing speech which I think we all found very illuminating, said that this was a completely new principle to be applied in British law. Is it not just a translation of an existing principle in EU law into United Kingdom law for the purposes of a smooth Brexit? Is it not, in fact, less exceptional than being a member of the European Union and allowing a court in a wholly different jurisdiction to impose itself on parliamentary sovereignty?”
“I wonder whether the hon. and learned Lady recalls the Mostyn judgment of 2013, in which a very senior member of the judiciary expressed astonishment that there was direct applicability of the charter in UK domestic law, given that the protocol had been attached to the charter when we originally signed up to it. Given the rather temporary nature of the charter rights, how can it be so fundamental to the Good Friday agreement? It did not exist in law in this country, and was not recognised by the judiciary, even after it had been brought into force in the treaties.”
“It is for the European Court of Justice to continue to interpret what the charter of fundamental rights actually means within the European Union, so if the charter was incorporated into our law, what relationship does my hon. Friend think would exist between our Supreme Court and the interpretations that would continue to be developed in the European Union?”