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British Membership of the European Communities: the Question of Parliamentary Sovereignty

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

John Taylor
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Extract

AT THE TIME OF WRITING (APRIL I975), THE REFERENDUM ON WHETHER or not Britain should stay in the European Communities is imminent. Originally is seemed as if the Referendum was going to be mainly about whether the terms of membership, renegotiated by the British government in fulfilment of its election pledge, were acceptable or not. However, more and more the actual terms, agreed after prolonged discussions and considerable heart-searching on all sides, seem to be fadin into the background and the central issue is revolving around the question of sovereignty and whether or not British membership of the Communities involves Britain in an unacceptable loss of it.

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Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 10 , Issue 3 , 01 July 1975 , pp. 278 - 293
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 1975

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References

1 Oxford English Dictionary definition.

2 Get Britain Out, published by the Communist Party of Great Britain, January 1975. A similar line of argument is to be found in the ‘Tribune Group’s’ pamphlet, ‘The Socialist Alternative to the Common Market’, by Michael Barrett Brown (February 1975), and, more predictably perhaps in publications, by Righ‐wing opponents of British membership.

3 Political Quarterly, January 1975, article by Professor John Mackintosh, MP.

4 See Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, 1949.

5 Doc. PE 35.807, March 1974. This is an internal document of the Parliament and not generally available.

6 Doc. PE 37.460/rev. originally published October 1974; revised edition completed March 1975.

7 The Political Groups have a highly important official status in the constitution of the European Parliament. They are composed of members of virtually all the political parties in the nine member countries, grouped together according to their political persuasion. There are six Political Groups at present, reading from left to right from the point of view of the President of the Parliament as he sits on his elevated rostrum in either Strasbourg or Luxembourg: the Communists and Allies, the Socialists, the Christian Democrats, the European Conservatives (18 British Conservatives and 2 Danes), the European Progressive Democrats (comprising French ‘Gaullists’ and the Irish Fianna Fail, the opposition party in Ireland) and the Liberals, who thus sit on the right of the Conservatives, reflecting the predominantly right‐wing position of the Liberals in most European national parliaments. To complete the placing of members of the European Parliament, the Independents or non‐inscrits should be mentioned. These range from the Italian neo‐fascists on the extreme Right to representatives of Belgian ‘language’ parties and include one crossbench peer Lord O’Hagan. The Bureau of the Parliament having, perhaps, a somewhat distant knowledge of the likely political orientation of the British aristocracy, originally placed Lord O’Hagan on the extreme Right, but on receiving his protest, they transferred his seat right round the Chamber so that he now sits next to the Communists.

8 The problem of providing an adequate research and information service to Members of Parliament, whether individually or to the Committees and other Parliamentary bodies on which they serve, is growing and forms part of the general difficulties faced by legislatures confronted with increasingly large, complex and well‐equipped executive bodies. To solve the resulting imbalance in expertise, various solutions have been adopted. In the British House of Commons, the research service available to Members is based on the library of the House. In Germany (the model for many of the procedures of the European Parliament) there is a separate Directorate as in the European Parliament itself, but on a much larger scale, the Wissenschaftliche Dienste, which has a staff of about 500. The largest, and one of the pioneers in the field, is undoubtedly the Library of Congress in the United States which currently employs some 4,500 officials.

9 L’Union Economique Belgio‐Luxembourgeoise (UEBL), and the Customs Convention of 1947 which established the Benelux Economic Union.

10 Article 8 of the Code douanier, 1949.

11 Act No. 933 of 1949.

12 With the coming in to full effect of Articles 110–116 of the Treaty of Rome.

13 See particularly Article 114.

14 Articles 132–5 of the Treaty.

15 Article 56 of the first Yaounde Convention and Article 58 of the second Yaounde Convention.

16 The New Despotism, by C. R. Hewitt, 1936, was perhaps the first important work in this field to attract wide attention.

17 A Fools Paradise, pp. 38–40, 43.

18 The Law and the Constitution, by Professor W. Ivor Jennings, pp. 137–8.

19 Defined in Article 34 of the Constitution.

20 Official Report 19 December 1974, col. 1914.