Dr Cooper's letter to The Times.

The link is here. Sir, Peter Riddell (Political Briefing, April 1) repeats the conclusion of the Lords Constitution Committee that the Lisbon treaty “would make no alteration to the relationship between the principles of the primacy of EU law and parliamentary sovereignty”. It is self-evident that those two principles are fundamentally incompatible. It would be more accurate to say that the true relationship between them is still being deliberately obfuscated. Speaking in the Commons on February 27, the Minister for Europe, Jim Murphy, quoted the Diceyan doctrine that Parliament has “the right to make or unmake any law whatever”. If that is the case, then clearly Parliament retains the right to legislate contrary to the EU treaties and laws even while the UK remains in the EU. If doing so caused problems with the governments of some other EU member states, they would be political problems for the UK Government, not the UK Parliament, to address and solve. British courts uphold that view, with the sole proviso that Parliament must make it clear that it intends to override EU law. But the European Court of Justice maintains the opposite, asserting that for EU member states EU law always has primacy and “cannot be overridden by domestic legal provisions, however framed”. It is only a matter of time before there is a serious collision between the two principles. It should be borne in mind that the federalist principle of the primacy of EU treaties and law was purely the invention of the European Court of Justice. It was not part of the original Treaty of Rome, and in fact it made its first appearance in a treaty as Article I-6 of the proposed EU constitution. Dr D. R. Cooper Maidenhead, Berks