Steven Barrett

Does the EU understand what sovereignty really means?

(Getty images)

The UK never tried to have our constitution written in one big session. We made it up by responding to each crisis when it happened. Brexit is just the latest.

The remaining sticking points on a deal are fish and something called the level playing field. Fish is very interesting, I assume, but it is politics, not law. So, as a lawyer who chooses not to speak on politics (some do), fish is none of my business.

But the Level Playing Field (LPF) – which is a legal problem – is. It is the elephant in the room. And yet the EU’s response to this issue is deeply unhelpful.

Rightly or wrongly, the public voted for Brexit. Brexit is about sovereignty and sovereignty is a legal question. The EU does not accept the same definition that everyone who is not the EU uses: freedom to make your own law. It is hard for us lawyers to define sovereignty any other way. While we were in the EU, sovereignty was pooled; they had some, we had some. A political choice was made to do that.

Then, there were lots of debates in 2015. They rightly focused on the political question which is: ‘Do we want to pool our sovereignty with the EU or not?’.

What it seems the EU has been doing for the last 54 months is to put differently coloured hats on the elephant in the room that is sovereignty in the hope it goes away. That seemed unlikely to work.

Losing sovereignty; losing the freedom to make laws, or even the freedom to copy someone else’s laws if you choose to, is an oddity of the EU. Plenty of people have tried to blame Boris Johnson for his intransigence in Brexit talks.

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