The man — or woman — in the street probably does not think much about sovereignty. Yet the true meaning of this word will be at the heart of the referendum campaign on whether we should remain in, or leave, the European Union.

It is the debate we should have had in 1972, when Parliament passed the European Community Act. The then Conservative government led by Edward Heath skilfully evaded the issue — and that is putting it politely.

On yesterday’s Andrew Marr Show, the current Tory leader and PM, David Cameron, dismissed the presenter’s question about whether we, the British people, would regain sovereignty if we were to vote to leave the EU, arguing: ‘That might give you a feeling of sovereignty, but it would be an illusion of sovereignty.’

Cameron went on to say that the real meaning of sovereignty was ‘the ability to get things done’.

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On yesterday’s Andrew Marr Show (pictured), David Cameron, dismissed the presenter’s question about whether we, the British people, would regain sovereignty if we were to vote to leave the EU

This was a pathetic response from a man who got a first-class degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Oxford.

Sir Noel Malcolm, that great university’s most distinguished historian of such matters, set out the truth in his 1991 work, Sense On Sovereignty: ‘What qualifies a state as sovereign is a matter of plenary and exclusive competence, of enjoying full authority internally and not being subordinated to the authority of another state.’

On that basis, the British Parliament and Government are not sovereign.

Inadequate

This was laid bare with devastating clarity by the Lord Chancellor, Michael Gove, when he gave his reasons for joining the campaign to leave the EU: ‘As a minister, I’ve seen hundreds of new EU rules cross my desk, none of which were requested by the UK Parliament, none of which I or any other British politician could alter in any way and none of which made us freer, richer or fairer.

‘It is hard to overstate the degree to which the EU is a constraint on ministers’ ability to do the things that we were elected to do.’

He went on: ‘Every single day, every single minister is told, “Yes Minister, I understand, but that is against EU rules.” I know it. My colleagues in Government know it. And the British people ought to know it, too: your government is not, ultimately, in control in hundreds of areas that matter.’

Michael Gove, pictured yesterday after joining the campaign to leave, said hundreds of new EU rules pass that ministers can do nothing about

And with that, David Cameron’s response to Andrew Marr was exposed by his close friend as not just pathetically inadequate, but as the complete opposite of the truth: for it is within the EU that Britain has ‘the illusion of sovereignty’.

Funnily enough, it was an earlier Lord Chancellor, Lord Dilhorne, who told the truth (but in a private note) to his party leader Harold Macmillan, in 1962, when that Conservative Prime Minister was preparing the ground to apply for membership of the Common Market: ‘These organs have supra-national powers which override those of the national constitutional bodies, and which are also incapable of challenge in the national courts of the member states.’

As the late Hugo Young, in his masterly history of the UK’s involvement with the EU, This Blessed Plot, observed: ‘No more limpid statement of lost independence is to be found from beginning to end of this history.’

Young was a strong supporter of British EU membership, which made his book’s revelations about the process by which Edward Heath persuaded Parliament to pass the 1972 European Community Act all the more telling: ‘Phrases were dreamed up that could mean all things to all men and women. “There is no question of any erosion of essential national sovereignty”, the government White Paper (proposing entry) said.

‘So “essential” glided into the vocabulary of reassurance. It offered the government deniability. For who could ever say the promise had been broken?’

Young’s forensic account went on: ‘This tendency continued in the House of Commons debates of 1971-2. Ministers did not lie, but they avoided telling the full truth. They refrained from stating categorically that the law of the European Community would have supremacy over British law.

‘This was a conscious, much deliberated choice. Spelled out in a clause that had to be openly debated and passed, Community supremacy would have had explosive possibilities.’

Astounding

Young also spoke to one of the parliamentary draftsmen who crafted this legislation: this unnamed law officer recalled that he had been told to ‘tread carefully’, as full and open admission of what was being done to parliamentary sovereignty would have been ‘so astounding’ as to have put the whole Bill in danger.

As we know, it passed; though later, Sir Geoffrey Howe, who was the government law officer in charge of the process, wrote in a private letter to a colleague: ‘I remain at least plausibly exposed to the charge that less of our thinking than was appropriate was explicitly exposed to the House of Commons.’ This was Howe-ese for ‘we pulled the wool over their eyes’.

Sir Geoffrey Howe (pictured) wrote in a private letter to a colleague: ‘I remain at least plausibly exposed to the charge that less of our thinking than was appropriate was explicitly exposed to the House of Commons.’

A few years later, in 1975, these matters were actually exposed to full public debate, when Harold Wilson (like Cameron, for the purely political reason of appeasing his own party) launched a referendum on whether the UK should stay in or leave what was then known as the Common Market.

But as another brilliant Oxford academic, Professor Iain McLean, points out in his book What’s Wrong With The British Constitution?, the 1975 campaigners for exit ‘threw away not just the ace of trumps but their entire trump suit … by concentrating on the European Parliament and ignoring the European Court of Justice and the effect of the 1972 Act’.

It is those, declares Professor McLean, which ‘have destroyed British parliamentary sovereignty’.

The government at the time put out a leaflet which asked ‘Will Parliament lose its power?’, and answered its own question with ‘No’, on the grounds that ‘No important new policy can be decided in Brussels … without the consent of a British Minister answerable to a British Government and British Parliament’.

The late Hugo Young (pictured) wrote a book about Britain's relationship with the EU, and said politicians in 1971 and 72 did not tell the public Europe would have supremacy over British law

That would have been the case if the British Government were able to exercise a veto against any ‘important new policy’ and if all such proposals required unanimity at the Council of Ministers in Brussels.

But since the passing of the Single European Act in 1988, so-called qualified majority voting has been the method by which these matters are settled.

Torrent

Over the past two decades there have been 72 occasions on which the UK has opposed a measure in the Council of Ministers. On every single one of those occasions, we have been outvoted.

This is the true measure of the extent to which we are really, as Cameron claims, ‘exercising influence in Europe’.

And the scale of this torrent of unwanted measures from Brussels has become vast. As the Conservative minister Dominic Raab said yesterday: ‘More than 60 per cent of UK laws are now made in, or derive from, the EU. Can we realistically expect such laws to reflect what Britons want, now they are the product of haggling with 27 governments and a European Commission of 33,000 civil servants?’

Some of these laws actually cost lives. Britain’s most prolific cancer researcher, Professor Angus Dalgleish, told me that the EU’s Clinical Trials Directive had increased the cost of his experiments more than ten-fold.

And he pointed out last month that ‘the unfathomable amount of EU regulation and bureaucracy has led to a third less clinical studies taking place in Britain. We were world-leading in these studies, but because of EU regulation, we now lag behind the United States.’

As with other more mundane matters, such as the EU-led requirement which affects how we are allowed to dispose of our household rubbish, it is absurd to exchange our autonomy for a marginal share of ‘influence’ on the other 27 countries of the EU — when no British voter could care how the citizens of, say, Luxembourg, dispose of their household refuse.

It is at this common-sense level that those arguing for Brexit should couch the debate.

As Sir Noel Malcolm suggested to me yesterday, in the wake of David Cameron’s shameless manipulation of the English language: ‘The word “sovereignty” is more trouble than it’s worth. Leave- campaigners should use “self-governing democracy”, which makes the same point.

‘Indeed, it would be refreshing to hear the other side say explicitly why they are against democratic self-government.’