European Union (Amendment) Bill

I suppose that one response to the hon. and learned Gentleman is that we can attempt to breach our treaty obligations, but whether we succeed in doing so will be up to the courts. We can certainly withdraw from the treaty—the Lisbon treaty explicitly allows for that—but I am in no doubt that we were able to do that all along. Another problem occurs to me in relation to the new clause on supremacy. The idea of supremacy is not really a rule within our constitutional order, but a presupposition of our constitutional order. Let me illustrate that. What if the judges were to do something which very occasionally some of them have suggested that they might do—change the order of priority between the supremacy of Parliament and the rule of law? All along, since the establishment of the supremacy of Parliament, judges have ultimately given way to what this Parliament says, even when that violates their ideas of the rule of law. But what if they were to reverse that? Could we, as a Parliament, re-establish the supremacy of Parliament by an Act of Parliament? The answer is obviously no. If we tried do that once the judges had come to a different presupposition, they would simply say that that presupposition was no longer the law. It is a question of the status of the supremacy of Parliament, which is, if anything, a rule of the common law. We ourselves, by passing amendments to Bills, cannot do anything about it. We cannot give it away either. We cannot give away our supremacy, and we cannot regain it if we lose it.