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Amery on the Constitution: Britain and the European Union*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Lord Beloff
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Extract

IT WAS ASSUMED BY AMERY THAT THE BRITISH CONSTITUTION WAS AN important topic for study and something which might require further reform, because with the rest of his generation he took it for granted that the Constitution was itself wholly under the control of the British people through their indigenous institutions. Parliamentary sovereignty could only be understood in the light of sovereignty in the sense of political independence. At the time he was writing the importance of this basic concept had been reinforced by recent experience. Many European countries had lost their sovereignty through the imposition of German rule and had only had it restored to them by a massive military effort in which Britain had played no mean part. In their turn, the victorious allies had deprived Germany of its sovereignty and were through the occupation regimes starting on a path which it was hoped would lead, as indeed it did, to a Germany purged of the Nazi virus.

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Articles
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Government and Opposition , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , April 1998 , pp. 167 - 182
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1998

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References

2 See Beloff, Lord Britain and European Union: Dialogue of the Deaf, London, Macmillan, 1996.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Underdown, David, A Freeborn People: Politics and the Nation in Seventeenth‐Century England, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 26–7.Google Scholar

4 This alternative was set forth by Lord Woolf in his ‘Mann Lecture’ of 15 November 1994.

5 Confusion between the functions of the two European Courts seems hard to dispel. It affects the discussion in Ferdinand Mount’s discussion of what he believes to be the ineluctable tide of European integration. Mount, F., The British Constitution Now, London, Heinemann, 1992, pp. 218 ff.Google Scholar

6 Boyce, George (ed.), The Crisis of British Unionism: Lord Selbourne’s Domestic Political Papers, London, The Historians’ Press, 1987, pp. 82–3.Google Scholar

7 ECJ Case C‐221/89 R v Secretary of State for Transport ex pane Factortame Ltd and Others (1991).

8 Hailsham, Lord, On the Constitution, London, Harper Collins, 1992, p. 82.Google Scholar

9 Wingfield‐Stratford, Esmé, Beyond Empire, London, Phoenix House, 1964, p. 2.Google Scholar

10 For an analysis of the likely changes to be proposed by other governments, see H. C. Foreign Affairs Committee, Third Report, 1995–96, The Intergovernmental Conference, H. C. 306, 23 July 1996. (The Treaty of Amsterdam was concluded but awaits ratification.)

11 Regina v Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food and Another, Ex parte First City Trading and others, The Times, 20 December 1996

12 United Kingdom v Council of the European Union, Case C984/94. Judgment delivered 12 November 1996. The Times, 21 November 1996.

13 Hayward, Jack (ed.), Elitism, Popularism and European Politics, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1996.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 Foreign Affairs Committee, Third Report, 1995–96, The Intergovernmental Conference, H.C.306, 23 July 1996.