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Parliamentary sovereignty is the epitome of British democracy. Voters elect their Members of Parliament, who answer to them in the ballot box at general elections. Parliament authorised the referendum, by which MPs outsourced the decision as to whether the United Kingdom would leave the European Union. They voted to leave.
I have campaigned inside and outside Parliament to regain our sovereignty since 1986. I created, with magnificent colleagues, the Maastricht Referendum Campaign in 1993. It was backed by Margaret Thatcher, who became its Patron. The Foundation I created then has been renamed this year to the “United Kingdom Sovereignty Foundation”.
My long years of campaigning have been focused on challenging the decision to join the European Community in 1972 by a small margin of votes in Parliament, and without asking the voters in a referendum. The European Communities Act 1972 subjugated our sovereignty to all laws and all rulings of the European Court of Justice.
From 1972 to the passing of the Withdrawal Agreement Act 2020, not one word or comma of EU laws was rejected or amended by the UK Parliament. The Commons became a rubber stamp for the EU Council of Ministers – meeting behind closed doors and making decisions by majority vote, and with no transcript, unlike our daily Hansard – across an ever-increasing swathe of policy.
Within a few days of the referendum, Keir Starmer had the nerve to call for a second referendum. This undermined the democratic decision of 17.4 million voters. Now he and his Cabinet are deliberately further undermining this decision with their “Reset Bill” that betrays our recovered sovereignty.
This Reset Bill would create a new constitutional framework for a relationship with the EU. It would impose a constantly evolving process of uncompetitive convergent dynamic alignment, like an EU amoeba, assimilating our laws with those of the failing European Union. Despite the mendacious propaganda being generated by the Government and rejoiners, our trade with the EU has not been undermined by our departure. It is the Chancellor and the Prime Minister who undermine British economic growth and stability with a range of economically disastrous policies. They misrepresent the benefits of leaving, to excuse themselves from their failures.
This reset has been hatched in secret since the 2024 general election. Within 20 days of that election, they abolished, without debate in one line, the European Scrutiny Committee empowered to hold them publicly to account. Under successive Conservative and Labour chairmen it had, since 1972, investigated and reported on all European lawmaking. All this subterfuge was done with fewer Labour votes in the 2024 election than Jeremy Corbyn in 2019. The Government has indicated that the UK laws they plan to align with the EU will ultimately be adjudicated by the European Court. Most egregiously, the laws will be made by statutory instrument via an autocratic procedure aptly named after Henry VIII, not by primary Acts of Parliament. This is reminiscent of aspects of the European Communities Act 1972 which led to our undemocratic subjugation and the rubber stamping of EU laws.
Henry VIII measures will preclude amendment and even a guaranteed vote. Casualties of the Reset Bill will include British fishermen, and our economic independence and competitiveness including bioscience, agricultural technology, cultivated proteins, gene-editing and AI itself, with increasing energy costs through the new energy-emissions trading scheme and through increased immigration via the youth mobility scheme.
For those who suggest this Henry VIII procedure was used when we left the EU in 2020, it was justifiable because our democratic self-government had been undermined by the European Communities Act 1972. Short of repealing at a stroke all existing EU enactments up to 2020, the removal of EU laws which were imposed by that 1972 Act could reasonably be done in a similar way.
Since leaving the EU, the UK has escaped no less than 13,000 EU laws and our £15bn annual contributions. It is breathtaking to hear the President of the European Commission and Keir Starmer recently justify this disgraceful reset as being a triumph of democratic values. It is exactly the opposite, with our paying billions for the privilege.
We shall fight the monstrous deceit of this reset in every forum available to us, from the grassroots through to Parliament, courts and the media.
This article was originally published in The Telegraph in April 2026, under the headline "Starmer's Brexit reset is an assault on British democracy"
