“This realm of England is an empire…”

            Getting rid of continental jurisdiction over the UK is as easy an enacting an Act of Parliament.  It was an Act of Parliament that brought in major EU powers. It is through amending or repealing that same Statute that EU powers can be limited or removed.

             England had to do this before. In 1533 Henry VIII was worried about the succession and believed his marriage to Catherine of Aragon to be void, as he had married his brother’s wife. In order to allow English divines to settle the matter without fear of Rome intervening and overruling, the Crown appealed to long history and custom, and to the powers of Parliament, to assert its own authority at the expense of the see of Rome. Parliament willingly passed an Act preventing future appeal of legal cases to Rome or elsewhere overseas. The UK wanted to make its own decisions. Royal will used Parliamentary authority to allow the Crown to end appeals to Rome.

           In language which rings down the centuries Parliament said:

“…this realm of England is an empire, and so hath been accepted in the world, governed by one supreme head and King…

And whereas the King his most noble progenitors and the nobility and Commons of this said realm, at divers and sundry Parliaments…made sundry ordinances,laws, statutes and provisions for the entire and sure conservation of the prerogatives liberties and pre-eminences of the said imperial crown of this realm, and of the jurisdictions spiritual and temporal of the same, to keep it from the annoyance as well as the see of Rome as from the authority of other foreign potentates attempting the diminution or violation thereof…”

         The EU has violated and diminished that imperial sovereignty, confirmed by Parliament in 1533 and passed to Parliament over the ensuing three centuries. What could be corrected by a revolutionary Act in 1533, with some distortion of the past truth about  the power of the see of Rome, could today be corrected by an Act of Parliamentary will in the spirit of English and British independence that was common for three centuries or more prior to 1972.

          Those who say that the UK can no longer be independent because it has signed binding Treaties do not seem to grasp our long history of independence, or understand how Treaties work. Treaties are solemn and binding for the time that they suit the signatories to them. When they cease to suit one or more of the contracting parties, they are renegotiated or renounced.  If the UK wants a different relationship with the EU it merely has to assert some political will. It will either be able to negotiate one more to its liking, or assert one, as Henry VIII did in rejecting appeals to Rome. It would be a less revolutionary act than Henry’s with more history and precedent on its side, thanks no little to the successful change of relationship with Europe achieved by the Reformation.

Read more at John Redwood’s Diary