In his latest column, PopCon Director, Mark Littlewood, says that unless Parliamentary sovereignty is restored, our decline as a nation won’t merely continue, it will accelerate.
We are teetering on the brink of a constitutional crisis. It is becoming increasingly clear that our immigration policy is now largely in the hands of judges rather than being controlled by Parliament.
Last week’s Prime Minister’s Questions was, on the face of it, a rather unremarkable affair. Kemi Badenoch thought she could skewer Keir Starmer on a judicial ruling allowing a Gazan family to remain in the UK under rules specifically designed for Ukrainians.
To everyone’s surprise, the PM agreed with the position being taken by the Leader of the Opposition. This rather blunted Kemi’s line of questioning, but so far, so unremarkable. The only interesting takeaway was that even Keir Starmer’s patience with the current legal system was reaching its limits. His government, he assured us, was already looking at ways to close this loophole in immigration law.
Roll forward a few days and we then have an extraordinary intervention by our nation’s most senior judge, Lady Chief Justice Carr. Her view was not merely that Starmer and Badenoch were wrong but that it was unacceptable for them to even discuss the matter on the floor of the House of Commons. Clearly, Parliament in Carr’s view is no longer sovereign. Indeed, she believes that there are areas where it should not merely be powerless, it must also be silent.
Barely a day goes by without some story displaying the broken nature of Britain’s constitution. Courts now determine who can stay in the country and on what grounds, what salaries should be paid to workers in warehouses and on the shop floor and even whether car salesmen can charge commission.
But Carr’s intervention this week raises the battle to a whole new level. We now have a Supreme Court that (as the name suggests) appears to think Parliament is its poodle.
All of this underscores not just the urgent need for a great constitutional restoration but also the complexities in bringing it about. It is surely now an open question as to whether the Supreme Court would actually accept an Act of Parliament which led to its abolition.
Democracy itself is now hanging by the thinnest of threads and the question the British people will need to answer when they next get the chance at the ballot box is not just who governs Britain but how Britain is governed.
Unless Parliamentary sovereignty is restored, our decline as a nation won’t merely continue, it will accelerate.
Keep the flag of freedom flying!
