We introduce Extreme TLDR generation, a new form of extreme summarization for paragraphs. TLDR generation involves high source compression, removes stop words and summarizes the paragraph whilst retaining meaning for the purpose of a university student, providing explanations and context for complex debates, topics, and meanings where necessary. The result is the shortest possible summary that retains all of the original meaning and context of the above text on: 6.5 Is Parliament Really Sovereign?
6.5.1 The Story So Far—and A Final Question
So far, our inquiry has focused on whether Parliament is capable of imposing any sort of limits on itself. We have seen that Wade’s continuing theory answers this question firmly in the negative, but that its veracity is open to question in the light of both the Parliament Acts and the European Communities Act. We have also seen that the new view holds that although Parliament cannot absolutely entrench legislation, it can impose conditions that must be fulfilled before legislation can be repealed or departed from.

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↵But while the continuing theory and the new view differ on whether a given Parliament can ever be subject to intended constraints—that is, constraints that exist because of the intention of earlier Parliaments—they agree on one thing: that Parliament is sovereign in the sense that it can make any law.326 It is therefore said that Parliament is free from unintended constraints—that is, constraints that do not derive from conditions imposed by Parliament itself at an earlier point in time. Our final question is whether that supposition is correct.

6.5.2 Model III—Unintended Constraints on Parliamentary Authority
We already know from our discussion in section 6.1 that not everyone thinks that Parliament should be free from unintended constraints: legal constitutionalists argue that legislative power should be subject to legal restrictions that can, if necessary, be enforced by the courts. But our question now is a different one: is the UK Parliament actually subject to such constraints? In order to answer this question, we need to distinguish between two sorts of such constraint.

It is obvious that there are practical constraints upon what Parliament may accomplish. Even if it has the legal power to enact any law, a law directing that the sun should never set over the UK again would accomplish nothing in practice. This reduces to the issue of enforceability: Parliament, if it is sovereign, can make any legal provision that it wishes, but whether it can secure real-world compliance with stipulations set down in legislation is another matter entirely. For example, it has been observed that if Parliament enacts ‘that smoking in the streets of Paris is an offence, then it is an offence’ as a matter of UK law—the French police and courts would take no notice of that law.327

Similarly, if Parliament is sovereign, then it can undo anything that it has previously done. It has therefore been noted that, as a matter of law, Parliament could repeal legislation conferring independence on countries that used to form part of the British Empire such that, as a matter of UK law, Parliament’s authority to legislate for such countries would resume. But Lord Denning pointed out that ‘Freedom once given cannot be taken away. Legal theory must give way to practical politics.’328

The fact that there are things such as those mentioned that Parliament cannot practically accomplish is not inconsistent with asserting that it is legally sovereign, since that concept simply means that Parliament can enact any laws that it wishes (whether or not they are sensible or practically enforceable). But are there also legal constraints on what Parliament can do? Are there some laws that it is not constitutionally competent to enact—and which, even if practically enforceable, would not be legally enforced by the courts?

The answer to this question, in the absence of a written constitution in the UK, might seem obvious. How can there be legal constraints on Parliament’s power if no written constitution prescribes any such constraints? But some writers—and now some judges—argue that the unwritten constitution may contain fundamental principles that are so important as to be immovable by Parliament.

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↵There are a number of ways in which this argument has been expressed. Allan, one of its leading proponents, argues that Wade was wrong to suppose that parliamentary sovereignty simply has to be accepted as a matter of historical fact;329 rather, Allan contends, the authority of a legislature to make law must derive from some recognised and accepted principle. And whatever the position might have been in 1688, the principle that today underpins Parliament’s authority is democracy. He goes on to argue that because democracy constitutes the moral foundation of Parliament’s lawmaking authority, it also traces the extent of that authority. It follows, says Allan, that if Parliament were to enact a law the ‘effect [of which] would be the destruction of any recognizable form of democracy’—such as ‘a measure purporting to deprive a substantial section of the electorate of the vote on the grounds of their hostility to government policies’—the courts should not enforce it.330

Other writers have expressed their arguments in different terms, but agree with Allan that Parliament is subject to constraints imposed by the unwritten constitution. Writing extrajudicially, Sir John Laws said that basic rights, such as freedom of expression, form part of a ‘higher-order law’—that is, they constitute a set of principles that ‘cannot be abrogated as other laws can’.331

This analysis situates Parliament not (as traditional sovereignty theory would have it) at the apex of the constitutional order, unconstrained by anything or anyone, but beneath a set of fundamental constitutional principles that bind Parliament and with which it is therefore impotent to interfere. This point was captured by Lord Woolf when he asserted that ‘both Parliament and the courts derive their authority from the rule of law’ and that both are therefore bound by it. It follows, he said, that ‘there are … limits on the sovereignty of Parliament which it is the courts’ inalienable responsibility to identify and uphold’.332 More recently, Lord Phillips, then President of the UK Supreme Court, said that ‘if Parliament did the inconceivable [by legislating contrary to a fundamental constitutional principle], we [the judges] might do the inconceivable as well’.333 These are radical assertions that depart markedly from orthodox thinking about parliamentary sovereignty. Would the courts really take such a drastic step?