Then As Now

" In this country the living reality is Parliament itself. In a sense, our constitution is an abstraction: it is what is said about, and what attempts to describe, the living reality of Parliament.

... In this country the guarantee of the supremacy of Parliament and of our legislative independence as a nation does not lie in words on paper. It does not lie in vellum and parchments. It lies in a political will and the continued exercise of that will, the political will of those of whom the House of Commons is the expression. The people themselves, their political will and their determination to exert it, are the ultimate guarantee, and the only ultimate guarantee, of the sovereignty of this House and of the legislative and political independence of the nation.

That fact, which I do not believe can be contested, is the reason why to pass this Bill lies outside that unwritten contract which all Members of this House have with those who sent them here. We have not been charged by that political will, on which alone rests the independence and sovereignty of Parliament and of this country, with the duty or the permission to share it or to abrogate it.

In their own consciences my hon. Friends must speak for themselves. But if it be open to dispute what these digital majorities betoken—under all the influences of power and patronage, which we well know operate in this House, and amid all the cross-currents which we understand and are familiar with—whatever be the judgment of the atmosphere here, there can be no doubt about the sense out of doors. The most determined attempts which have been made month after month by all forms of persuasion to shake the political disinclination of the great body of the people towards what is being done by this Bill have proved unsuccessful.

Whether it has been presented on the one hand as a fait accompli, as something which is over and done, something which is all over bar the shouting, which people must make shift to get used to, or whether it has been presented in the most glowing colours as new opportunity, as accretion of sovereignty or power, the great mass of the people, whose sovereign expression in this House is at stake, have remained unmoved. The only practical effect of this long Committee stage has been to expose to those outside even more clearly what is at stake. Their reaction to that clearer understanding, to which perhaps our debates have contributed, is such that it is a usurpation for a House of Commons, well knowing the state of opinion in the country, to seek by the Bill to surrender or diminish the sovereignty of Parliament, and the ultimate authority of our courts, including the High Court of Parliament over the subject in all matters and causes.

(Mr. J. Enoch Powell (Wolverhampton, South-West) Hansard 5 July 1972)