My Lords, critics complain that Brexit and the trade and co-operation agreement will somewhat reduce economic growth, but should maximising growth be paramount? They regret too that we will lose freedoms to study, to start a business, to live; even, the Observer laments, to fall in love in Europe. Those who foresee such a diminished life for us ignore that we will regain a fundamental freedom: the freedom to make our own laws, in our own Parliaments, accountable to our own citizens, with those laws applied in our own courts, subject to no foreign jurisdiction. That parliamentary sovereignty is the great prize.
There has been much misrepresentation of the concept of sovereignty. The term does not denote untrammelled freedom of action; all nations operate within constraints—of physical and economic reality, power politics, the need to negotiate and compromise. The point is obvious and banal. It is not a ground for deriding Britain’s reassertion of sovereignty, properly understood as the right to legislative autonomy and self-government. As democrats, we should treasure sovereignty. Some who oppose Brexit deplore invocation of sovereignty as populism, a fantasy of British exceptionalism, anachronistic, a slide into isolation and ugly nationalism. It should not be any of those things. To reclaim our sovereignty is to articulate anew the liberal constitutionalism that led us over centuries to develop parliamentary government. If British exceptionalism means a proud and tenacious attachment to parliamentary democracy, I embrace that exceptionalism now and for our future.
Why do politicians who applaud the assertion of democratic values in other countries regard it as retrograde in our own? Why do they assume that as a self-governing democracy we will not enter alliances with mutual obligations for mutual advantage, working with the European Union and across the globe on the great issues that require international co-operation, honourably observing international law?
Since the 1970s, we have witnessed, with sadness and foreboding, a growing disaffection from Westminster. It has been no coincidence that this has happened since the enactment of the European Communities Act 1972. There have been other sources of political disaffection for sure, but the fact that Westminster alienated sovereignty—abdicating to Brussels its responsibility to govern across a broad range of policies—has been a primary one. Westminster now has the opportunity to recover the respect of our people. This is Britain’s opportunity for democratic renewal. I say to my friends who are despondent: we only need faith in our democratic capacity, confidence that we can govern ourselves successfully and ambition to be a model to the world.
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