In Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain, Fintan O’Toole asks: ‘If restoring sovereignty to Westminster and the British courts is the point of the exercise, why does the rhetoric of Brexit so quickly resolve itself into hysterical attacks on the exercise of this very sovereignty by Parliament and the Supreme Court?’. O’Toole suggests that in order to escape this contradiction there is ‘recourse to the dark, deep past where sovereignty is befuddled by feudal notions of honour and duty’, and particularly, via the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg, to rhetorical evocations of both English ‘vassalage’ to continental European powers in the dim and distant past, and to great victories such as Waterloo, Crécy and Agincourt.
This is undoubtedly the case, but in order to reach the heart of this contradiction we also need to understand what many Brexiters actually understand by sovereignty, and by parliamentary sovereignty in particular. To help us to do so, it might be useful to turn briefly to the shenanigans attending the passage of the Human Rights Act (HRA) 1998.
The Bill was constantly hedged about by endless assurances that it ‘must not disturb Parliament’s supremacy’, as a much-beleaguered Lord Irvine habitually put it. To which Anthony Barnett responded in This Time: The Constitutional Revolution:
