mr president in ten years in this chamber i have listened to an awful lot of humbug but i do not think i have ever heard such unadulterated piffle as i heard in the debate on this report yesterday from paleo-federalists such as mr brok and mr corbett canting about the sovereignty of national parliaments as though they cared about it
the sovereignty of a parliament is shorthand for the sovereignty of the people
it is not there to guarantee the privileges of national parliamentarians
when we elect a parliament we entrust it with the safeguarding of our liberties for a temporary and contingent period
national parliamentarians have no right to make permanent derogations to those freedoms without going back and asking for an explicit mandate from the people
we have six hundred and forty-six members of parliament in the united kingdom
six hundred and thirty-eight of them were elected on the basis of an explicit promise that they would put the european constitution to a referendum before they ratified it
when we hear all this stuff about how the european constitution is now legal because all these parliamentarians have gone ahead with it that does not invalidate the case for a referendum it invalidates the case for representative democracy as it is
if you want to restore honour and meaning and purpose to our existing systems of representative government we should trust the people and give them their referendum as we promised
