European Union (Withdrawal) Bill — House of Commons, 2017-11-21
Topic: International Affairs
William Nigel Paul Cash (Conservative, Centre-right): No, I will not, because, as the Chair will appreciate, I have taken a lot of interventions, as I did last time, when I took six or eight. It is impossible to get the arguments out in reply to my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Beaconsfield, with whom I have been discussing this for an extremely long time—for the best part of 20 years—if I am constrained in this way, so I am not going to take any further interventions What lies behind these amendments is not only the charter itself, but the whole role of judicial interpretation and jurisprudence in its application to the UK; by virtue of the way in which the amendments would apply, the Supreme Court would inherit the power to invalidate and disapply Acts of Parliament. This is a matter of the gravest constitutional significance and it goes to the heart of the stability of this country and its rule of law. In turn, that goes to the heart of our democratic system and the right of the British people to govern themselves, whichever party they come from, in respect of how they vote in free elections, exercising their freedom of choice as to whom they decide to govern them until the next general election All this is intrinsically bound up with the claimed virtues of the European Court itself—it is not impartial. As I said in the previous debate, when the European Court adjudicated on the Van Gend en Loos case and Costa v. ENEL in the 1960s and early 1970s, and the Internationale Handelsgesellschaft case, it was doing so on its own initiative, without any basis in EU treaties, until the Lisbon treaty, which we on this side of the House, including my right hon. and learned Friend, opposed. That is what did this. We opposed it. He opposed it. I simply make that point to put it on the record This Lisbon treaty, as the European Scrutiny Committee also demonstrated, was the Giscard d’Estaing proposal for a European constitution by any other name. It is part and parcel of the other characteristic of the European Court, which is the drive towards political integration and its interpretation of law by the purposive rule, even when the wording in question is neither obscure nor ambiguous. Furthermore, many different purposes may, from time to time, be in conflict with one another, but the driving force for them is the integrationist road map from which it never deviates and never will. It is the ultimate engineer of European integration. Equally, it has adopted a method of interpretation that neutralises the principle of the conferral of powers that were meant to be limited under articles 4 and 5 of the treaty on European Union. By doing so, it has extended the range and effect of European law by leaps and bounds. With that comes the extensions of competence, which in turn are everlastingly overarching and limitless. The European Court has never once annulled a general EU legislative act, except on one occasion, and when it did so, it was re-enacted almost immediately. It is permanently on the march in favour of political integration and by any standard is therefore more a political than judicial court.