2023: The Year of Extreme Parliamentary Sovereignty
If I had to pick one legal trend that has dominated this year and will be remembered as the main shift in 2023 it is the abuse of Parliamentary sovereignty.
At its core, the principle means that Parliament can legislate for anything that it wants and that must be upheld. This makes a lot of sense: Parliament is (half) comprised of elected MPs who represent the people of the UK and so the laws that are passed do, if imperfectly, represent the will of the people.
When I used to teach public law at university, I would explain Parliamentary sovereignty by relying on a famous quote by Sir Ivor Jennings. He said: “If Parliament enacts that smoking in the streets of Paris is an offence, then it is an offence”.
Of course, this is absurd. The UK would never enact such a law and France would certainly not treat it as being worth the paper that it is written on.
However in 2023, what was once the realm of the absurd has become government policy.