Our
Loss of Sovereignty
I have no doubt about the deep and enduring importance of Britain’s
decision to repossess by her own force the Falkland Islands, which had been
invaded and occupied by a foreign power, and of the military success which
crowned that decision. I have
equally little doubt that this happened, and only happened, because a certain
lady in a certain key position, who turned out to be in tune with the national
instinct and perception, put her foot down and kept it down. By this event those of who see, as I do, the Falklands issue
– national sovereign identity – staring us in the face, north, south, east
and west, are likely to have been encouraged.
It is necessary that we should not be over-encouraged.
If we realise how peculiarly favourable the circumstances on the 3rd
of April 1982 were for the operation of a female foot and how constricted is its
movement in other circumstances, we may be the better able to help to prevent
the Falklands event from becoming a mere flash in the pan and not the first of a
series of controlled explosions.
The crucial fact about the 3rd of April was that the Prime
Minister, and therefore the nation, were not committed in the opposite direction
by past public words. Others may
have been up to the neck in schemes to abort Britain’s public pledge to the
Islanders and to get rid of British sovereign territory.
For all we know, something to that effect may even have figured in state
papers which included No. 10 on their circulation list.
But publicly the sheet was clean: the assertion which had the nation’s
‘full-hearted consent’ was untarnished; there were no prime ministerial
words to be eaten.
Alas, in what other context can the same be said?
Yes, economic policy, perhaps; but there, though the right economic
assertions were tangled up with injudicious and incompatible ones, they were
still plain and palpable. Anyhow,
we are not – or not primarily – talking economics.
The day before Parliament rose for the summer recess, the female foot did
in fact stamp a hole through an existing commitment, when in reply to my oral
question Mrs. Thatcher declared that ‘no commitment exists for Her Majesty’s
Government to consult the Irish Government on matters affecting Northern
Ireland’. What is not clear is
whether the owner of the foot realised how much, in order to make good that
action, of the acts and words of British Governments, including her own, would
have to be repudiated and reversed. For
decades the actions and aims of British statecraft had privately been directed
towards disembarrassing the United Kingdom of its province twelve miles across
the North Channel and producing, in some form, a state embracing the whole
island of Ireland which could then be embodied without reservation in the
Western Alliance and the political unity of Europe.
These actions and aims were irreconcilable not only with the pledges
repeatedly given by Britain to Northern Ireland but with the nature of the
parliamentary union itself. Whether
or not the Prime Minister was fully apprised of them, she herself made, first
privately and then publicly, agreements with the Irish Republic which would be
understood, as designed to implement those policies and which were inconsistent
with her own repeated assertion of the UK’s exclusive sovereign rights in this
part of its territory.
Then in the last week of July 1982 she put down her foot.
Did she know what she was doing? Did
she mean what she was doing? Did
she, if so, purpose to carry it through, ripping up on the way the Foreign
Office policy of a whole generation? And
if she did so, would she be in tune with the national instinct and perception?
To discuss the Falklands event and British sovereignty without asking
those questions is an exercise in footling.
Something like it had happened earlier.
Fifteen months before she became Prime Minister, Mrs. Thatcher publicly
observed that people in London and other English cities were living in fear of
being ‘swamped’ by the New Commonwealth population. There was no doubt, that time, what the national instinct and
perception was; and those of us who also knew the facts said to ourselves
‘Oho! Then commitments, public sentiments, legislation, will have to be torn
up by the cartload’. But the
fleet did not sail from Portsmouth; and when in 1981 the Prime Minister denied
that what had happened in Brixton had anything to do with unemployment, a shot
across the bows proved sufficient to cause the fleet to heave to.
However, if it be thought extravagant to introduce the question of ‘what
sort of people we are’ into the context of national sovereignty, there
remains, more insistent than ever but unresolved, the relationship of the United
Kingdom with the European Economic Community.
That the British Parliament formally abdicated in 1972 its exclusive
competence to legislate and tax in the United Kingdom and recognised the
supremacy of an external legislature and an external court is not rendered
compatible with national sovereignty by the declaration, officially made in 1975
at the time of the referendum, that Parliament can always repeal the 1972
European Communities Act and thereby compel – or enable (whichever way you
look at it) – the Government to terminate Britain’s membership of the ECC.
Sovereignty not exercised is sovereignty renounced.
The prime ministerial foot has more than once been stamped in the last
three years in the context of the EEC; but the same three years have seen the
silent extension of the Community’s decision-making institutions into
explicitly political and international areas and the relegation to limbo of the
national power of veto provided by the Luxembourg compromise.
Some reluctance it may have been possible to detect occasionally; but the
constraints of the status quo have always prevailed.
Past commitments, even past acquiescence, cannot be repudiated without
long, intensive and public preparation. Such
preparation was, in the circumstances, not practicable.
At no point along the road from 1975 – or, for that matter, from 1971
– had there been a moment when a leader of a political party could suddenly
replace ‘Yes’ by ‘No’.
The obstacles we overcame to retake the Falklands may have seemed large at
the time. They are molehills
compared with those which lie between us and the recovery of what this nation
has lost in sovereignty during the last thirty years.
'Thanks to David Hamilton for sending this'