European Union (Amendment) Bill

The hon. Gentleman is right to point to the problem, put simply, being about whether anyone could obtain an injunction against the Speaker to prevent the Speaker from putting a particular question to the House. However, that is such an implausible circumstance that I cannot see how it could arise; the courts would have to have entirely abandoned not only the words of the Bill of Rights, but its entire spirit and structural importance. The hon. Gentleman has produced an excellent, elegant solution to a problem that does not yet exist. I shall be interested to hear his comments in support of his new clause. I cannot support the hon. Gentleman's new clause on supremacy. The problem with the word ““supremacy”” is that it has too many different meanings. When people talk about supremacy, they often confuse political capability—a capacity to do things—with theories about which legal order can be changed by Acts of a particular Parliament. Even in respect of that second interpretation, I sometimes get the impression that people who talk about the supremacy of Parliament want to get to a situation in which this Parliament can make European law. That is impossible; the legislative supremacy of this Parliament relates only to its ability to change the British legal order. We will never be in a position to change the European legal order. What keeps coming up in our debates is the question of what happens when those two legal orders clash. When that happens, it seems to me that there is nothing that we can do to alter the result as the hon. Gentleman wants.