Liberal Democrat peer Viscount Thurso in House of Lords in 1998, having failed to amend the Scotland Bill, bringing back a Scottish Parliament after nearly 300 years. Press Association archive. All rights reserved.While the Miller case has been hailed as a victory for Parliament in the face of an overbearing executive, that is only half of the story. The Supreme Court in Miller has restated the conventional narrative of parliamentary sovereignty; the most surprising aspect is that the case was needed in the first place. Why did it take the litigation of Gina Miller and Deir Tozetti Dos Santos to require the Supreme Court to make a decision that could equally forcefully have been articulated by the speaker of the Commons on the advice of his lawyers?
The Supreme Court decision affirms the conventional story of parliamentary sovereignty. An understanding that has its origins in the decision of the Tudors to govern through Parliament and the seventeenth century struggle with the King; settled decisively in Parliament’s victory in the Civil War; confirmed in the Glorious Revolution, and the Bill of Rights (1689).
Parliamentary sovereignty predates the creation of a unitary state, and is only given democratic force by the Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867, where Parliament is made subject to the people. But since the time of Albert Venn Dicey’s An Introduction to the Law of the Constitution (Dicey, 1885) – still acknowledged by the Supreme Court as the classical statement of Parliamentary Sovereignty – the doctrine has suffered a century’s long erosion with the growth of a supranational constitution; the judicialisation of human rights; a devolution settlement creating a quasi-federal state and the increasing reliance of the executive on delegated legislation.
