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Parliamentary sovereignty

Parliamentary sovereignty is the concept that a parliament has sovereignty, therefore it has the power to pass or repeal any law that cannot be overturned by any other body, with a majority vote in favour of the proposal.

In the United Kingdom

In the United Kingdom, there are three features of parliamentary sovereignty:

• Parliament can make law in any area
• No Parliament can bind it successor (a Parliament cannot pass a law that cannot be changed or reversed by a future Parliament)
• No body except Parliament can change or reversed law passed by Parliament.

However, today the extent to which parliamentary sovereignty exists is debatable. An outcome of European Union membership has been that EU law takes precedence of UK law and UK law which is incompatible with EU law can be struck down by the EU, specifically the European Court of Justice. The first example of this was the Factortame case. However, as Parliament still has the power to leave the EU, by repealing the European Communities Act 1972, sovereignty is preserved. This is legal sovereignty; it seems very unlikely that Parliament would pass a proposal to leave the EU, so political sovereignty has been lost.

Another factor that is said to undermine parliamentary sovereignty is the increasing use of referendums, which take away power from Parliament as the decision whether to pass law is made by the electorate, not Parliament. However,as Parliament could still reverse decisions made by referendums, legal sovereignty is preserved. As with EU membership, it seems very unlikely Parliament would reverse the decisions of referendums, so political sovereignty has been lost.