Gerry Hassan: Time to stop pretending parliament has the power

The curse of the European issue has been slowly re-emerging for the Tory-led government after a period of relative calm. Right-wing voices have said the European Union Bill, with its Clause 18 defining parliamentary sovereignty, is not clear and powerful enough to block continued encroachment of Brussels into British public life.

What then is this thing called parliamentary sovereignty, why are our political classes obsessed with it, and what does this tell us about the health of our democracy?

Britain's parliamentary sovereignty is based on the notion that no parliament can legally bind its successor. It is a myth, fraud and part of the folklore that makes up how the British constitution has evolved.

The reality is that Britain stopped being governed by parliamentary sovereignty in the pure sense a long time ago. The rise of party and cabinet government was one factor in the early 20th century. Another was the creation of dominion status for Canada and Australia in the Empire, limiting the powers of Parliament.

A significant moment was the accession of the UK to the then Common Market in 1973. Related to this has been the emergence of a more politicised judiciary, the increased use of judicial review and the passing of the Human Rights Act.

Then there is Scotland. Long before devolution we had MacCormick versus the Lord Advocate in 1953 - a complicated judgment which in many eyes qualified parliamentary sovereignty in Scotland.

More crucially, do our elected politicians really believe the people out there hold on to the idea of parliamentary sovereignty? Have they learned nothing from the expenses scandal and the private welfare state they built to cocoon themselves from the harsh winds they inflicted on the rest of us? Public rage on this showed a sentiment shaped by popular, not parliamentary sovereignty.

Political power now stems from the people, not Parliament. The confused Conservative Eurosceptic response to this is shown by the fact that their suggested ultimate defence of parliamentary sovereignty in the European Union Bill is the holding of a referendum whenever the EU proposes to extend its powers.

A referendum - a device once frowned upon by the defenders of the British constitution as being "unBritish" and the sort of thing used by continental dictatorships - undermines parliamentary sovereignty. The reason is that it is an expression of popular sovereignty.

Some of the Tory discontent in this is admittedly with backbench frustration with the Cameroons and David Cameron himself. There is a feeling that strays far beyond the Tory right that David Cameron isn't exactly "a Tory" and that this is not a Conservative enough administration.

The toxic distrust on the Tory right takes them into a surreal world where a more full-blooded Conservative Party would be rapturously received by the voters.One paradox of this is that as parliamentary sovereignty has weakened in practice, politicians have become more obsessed by it. It is one of the tales told which makes Westminster feel special and unique. Parliamentary sovereignty is one of the last stories of British exceptionalism; a kind of British version of the American dream but just for our political elites.

Then there is the story of British democracy and liberty, which has been reduced to a Whig-style caricature and set of clichs whereby all the Westminster classes sign up to the special importance of Britishness.

Parliamentary sovereignty has a special place in this story, for it is the conventional account of how Britain became a democracy, its politicians stood up to despots and overthrew arbitrary power. All of this was then given validation through British democracy surviving the Second World War when "we kept the lights on in Europe" and then built a welfare state and civilised society.

Our democracy and Parliament was meant to be the envy of the world at the end of Second World War, but this fed into a British complacency and conceit. One British expert on politics responded to a US academic by calling the British constitution "as nearly perfect as any human institution could be". Now only two other democracies have parliamentary sovereignty, New Zealand and Finland, while "first past the post" is only used in a few places such as the US, Canada and India. British democracy is increasingly an anachronism.

The old system of parliamentary sovereignty was shaped by a carefully constructed system of checks and balances which gave Britain relatively representative and responsible government. However, as Britain faced huge economic and social challenges this system began to fall apart.

From Thatcher on, governments have interpreted parliamentary sovereignty to be partisan, centralise powers, reward supporters, and abolish tiers of government.

Thatcherism and New Labour drove through their revolutions on minority votes, aided by our truncated democracy and the ethos of parliamentary sovereignty. This allowed them to mount in Chris Mullin's words "a very British coup", using the cloak of time old precedent to push through far-reaching change.

To this day, Westminster corridors are filled not only with the ghosts and tales of old, but with worship and deference to the voodoo myth that is parliamentary sovereignty.

It is a fiction, but the worst, most damaging kind of fiction, one which our political classes believe to be true. It is a mantra which animates and holds prison our politics, political system and ourselves, the people.It has long outserved its usefulness, and should be carted away to a museum or made the subject of a David Starkey TV special on the mumbo-jumbo people used to believe in the bad old days. It is time for Britain to enter the modern age, become a fully fledged democracy, and dispense with the idea that parliamentary sovereignty protects us.