The UK, sovereignty and the EU

Article 2 of the United Nations Charter states that the organisation is “based on the sovereign equality of all its Members”. Thus, all UN members are equal. Yet the five Permanent Members of the Security Council have powers far greater than the other members. Respect for human rights, enjoined on them by the Charter, is regularly abused by many UN member Governments who have no respect for the ‘sovereignty’ of their citizens. President Assad can brutalise many of his own people; yet he has the sovereign right under the UN Charter to call on the military aid of Russia to combat an armed attack against him by some of those same citizens.

Closer to home, the monarch is our ‘sovereign’; yet she has no sovereign powers. The authority of the Queen in Parliament is actually the authority of Parliament over the Queen. Our forebears cut the head off a sovereign King to ensure that it is so.

There is nothing crystal clear about sovereignty. Yet we are all powerfully attached to it.

On 1 February 1967, at a Brussels Press Conference, the ITN journalist, Peter Snow, challenged the British Prime Minister to accept that “joining the European Community means some surrender of sovereignty”.

Harold Wilson replied: “When you use the phrase ‘surrender of sovereignty’, I want to make it clear that this emotive phrase is – has never been – one that has frightened me”. Wilson had, he reminded Snow, made it clear in the House of Commons four years previously that “a progressive surrender of sovereignty is a mark of an advancing civilisation”, starting with Britain’s membership of the International Postal Union a century earlier.

Twenty years later, Sir Geoffrey Howe, as British Foreign Secretary, used to argue that sovereignty was not something you either clung onto, or lost irrevocably. Sovereignty could be shared.

If that seems obvious, the issue nonetheless lies at the heart of the debate about Britain’s EU membership. And I guess what most people are thinking of when they talk about loss of sovereignty within the European Union is the fact that many of the laws which apply in the United Kingdom are made, not by our Parliament, but by the collective decision making of all the Member States and the European Parliament. The sovereignty of the British Parliament in this context, like that of every other Parliament in the EU, is the nuclear one of deciding to terminate membership of the organisation.

In this respect, membership of the EU is unlike membership of other international organisations, for those organisations generally have a set of rules determined by treaty and the consent of all is necessary to change them. The EU, by contrast, is dynamic, making new laws to address new challenges, from banking regulation to environmental protection. We can remove ourselves from involvement in that process but, even if we were no longer EU members, we could not insulate ourselves from the impact on us of decisions taken by the 27 countries who are presently our present partners.

In our hearts, we want to be King Henry V at Agincourt. King Canute, by contrast, is nobody’s role model; but he knew a tide when he saw it.

About the author

Sir Stephen Wall was for 35 years a member of the British Diplomatic Service. He worked closely with five British Foreign Secretaries and was Foreign Policy Adviser to Prime Minister John Major. His European experience includes five years as Head of the Foreign Office European Department; two years as Britain’s Ambassador to Portugal; five years as UK Permanent Representative to the EU and four years as EU adviser to Prime Minister Tony Blair and Head of the European Secretariat in the Cabinet Office. His book on Britain’s EU policy, ‘A Stranger in Europe’, was published in 2008. He has written The Official History of Britain and the European Community, 1963-1975, published in July 2012.