UKIP's Lord Willoughby de Broke brings hope of return of British sovereignty and people power a tiny step closer

Congratulations to UKIP's Lord Willoughby de Broke. His Constitutional Reform Bill (.pdf file) passed through it's second reading in the House of Lords yesterday and moves on to the 'Committee of the Whole House' stage.

Most everyday folk - as was the case for this blogger! - probably don't have an understanding of what that means.

After a bit of digging, we did find the full explanation on the significance. It's all mapped out HERE. As you'll see, there is a very long way to go before this Bill has any chance of becoming law.

So, what does Lord Willoughby de Broke's Bill call for? Quite a few things as you'll see if you download the pdf file from the link at the top of this post. The headline call, however, is pretty straightforward:

1 Withdrawal from the European Union

(1) The European Communities Act 1972 (c. 68) is repealed.
(2) Courts in the United Kingdom shall no longer have judicial notice of decisions of the Court of Justice of the European Communities or the Court of First Instance.

3 International treaties

Neither Her Majesty, nor any Minister of the Crown on Her behalf, may enter into treaties, agreements or other binding international instruments without the prior authorisation of Parliament.

There's plenty of other good stuff in the Bill, too - such as a call for fixed term Parliaments and steps to restore some of the democratic deficit.

The scope of the Bill is ambitious but the proposals outlined seem incredibly logical solutions to a lot of the democratic ills that our once proud nation is suffering.

This blogger will let you pick through the links above to research it fully, but we thought we'd pick up the key passages from Lord Willoughby de Broke's speech at the start of the debate to highlight. This blogger has indicated where we've skipped little extracts and we've changed a tiny bit of formatting. Please follow the links in this post to see the official and authoritative Hansard record.

Meanwhile, congratulations to UKIP's Lord Willoughby de Broke and all those who have supported him in the House of Lords for allowing this common-sense and democracy and sovereignty restoring Bill to have progressed onto it's new stage.

(Note: The highly respected Conservative free-spirit MP Douglas Carswell is working on a separate Bill for the House of Commons)

Anyway, onto those passages from Lord Willoughby de Broke's speech in yesterday's House of Lords debate:

Lord Willoughby de Broke: "I remember that when the Bill had its First Reading on 19 November and I read out its first provision to repeal the European Communities Act 1972, there was a rather tolerant gust of laughter around the House. I was slightly surprised but did not mind at all; I have got used to the fact that certain noble Lords in this House find it difficult to understand that there can be any suggestion of life outside the EU. My reason for including this apparently laughable measure - the repeal of the 1972 Act - is that it is fundamental to the Bill. Without it, I submit that there is little point in talking about constitutional reform. Successive Governments and successive Parliaments have, through successive treaties, given ever more of their rightful powers to the EU. There can be no meaningful reform without claiming back those powers for Parliament and for the voters who elect that Parliament."

"[...] In the past 10 years, we have passed nearly 500 Acts of Parliament, added to the almost uncountable tens of thousands of regulations and statutory instruments - more than 10,000 in the past three years alone. When preparing for this Bill, I was astonished to find that 200 statutory instruments had been passed since 1 January this year alone - the Poultry Compartments (England) Order 2010, the Video Recordings (Labelling) Regulations and the Infrastructure Planning (Interested Parties) Regulations, to name but three."

"These tens of thousands of SIs do not have a hope of being properly scrutinised. Indeed, many of them-particularly those coming to us from Brussels and directly applicable-are not even laid before Parliament. According to information supplied to me by the Library, the last time that an affirmative statutory instrument was defeated in [the House of Commons] was in 1978."

"[...] I believe that the most profound change in the past 100 years to the way that this country is governed has been the incremental handover of legislative powers to Brussels from Westminster in a succession of EU treaties. No one in this country under the age of 55 has ever had a chance to say whether they agreed with that or not. My Bill would give people a meaningful say in decisions that affect their lives and which they pay for with their taxes."

"Clauses 11 and 16 give governments, national and local, the right to hold referendums, and give voters the right to do the same through qualifying petitions. I do not accept for a moment the patronising arguments advanced in this House during our debate on the Lisbon treaty that voters are either too ignorant or too irresponsible to be granted such a right. That is an argument against democracy itself. Referendums work very well indeed in Switzerland, arguably the most democratic country in the world. I would expect the Government, at least, to accept my argument, as the Prime Minister has announced that he will propose that a decision be taken on whether to have first-past-the-post or alternative vote elections, to be decided by a referendum."

"Clause 10 defines those areas that are reserved to Parliament and beyond the scope of local authorities. Clause 17 calls for a review of public bodies to ensure that they are necessary, accountable and cost-effective. This review will cover, for example, regional development agencies, regional assemblies and the forest of more than 1,100 quangos - or non-departmental public bodies, as they are also known - that have sprung up in the past 15 years, from the Advisory Committee on Advertising to the Youth Justice Board, via the Drainage Council for Northern Ireland and the Potato Council. A royal commission will decide where the axe should fall, in the public interest. Only this morning I read in the papers that the cost of quangos has now mushroomed to £46 billion a year. There must be some savings to be made there."

"The thrust of my Bill is the rebalancing of powers away from the Executive and a whipped Parliament to the people. Sir Francis Bacon wrote: 'A country is less free if it is all in the hands of the state'. This Bill will go some way to loosening the state's grasp, and I commend it to your Lordships. I beg to move."

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UKIP's leader Lord Pearson also made a powerful speech on this Bill - here's the first main section:

Lord Pearson: "My Lords, it will come as no surprise to noble Lords to learn that I support my noble friend's Bill. Its two most radical proposals are that the United Kingdom should leave the European Union and that the British people should be granted the power to hold binding referendums at national and local level. I submit that without these two essential proposals becoming a reality, the future of this country is beginning to look very worrying indeed. Of course, the political class will not welcome the Bill, as no doubt we will now hear, but the British people are not infinitely patient and they are getting very frustrated and angry with our present political system and those who run it and live off it. For years now they have resented the quantity of interfering legislation which has been forced on them and have seen their politicians as "in it for themselves". I submit that their disdain has been turned into anger by the recent revelations about parliamentary expenses and into fear by our disastrous financial situation, for which they are of course right to blame their leaders."

"I also submit, not for the first time, that the cause of much of the people's frustration is that they have come to see that whatever they do, whatever letters they write to their Members of Parliament, however many of them march our streets in protest against one or other folly visited upon them by Brussels or Westminster, or for whichever party they cast their votes, it makes no difference. They cannot change anything. The tide of unwanted legislation flows on. Their post offices and pubs close, their waste is not collected and their hospitals are too often dirty and incompetent. Too many of their children fail in life because they have not been taught to read. Their police are weighed down with bureaucracy while the crime rate remains at unacceptable levels. Their prisons are overflowing with the mentally ill and the illiterate. The morale of their Armed Forces, which quite simply are the finest in the world, is starting to sap and, perhaps most pernicious of all, their borders have been deliberately dismantled by politicians who loathe their proud history and culture, so their inner cities have been turned into very dangerous places indeed."

"It is not just that people feel that they cannot make a difference or change anything; they cannot. Modern Governments, under our absurd first past the post system, are elected by about 24 per cent of the electorate, or 40 per cent of the 60 per cent who still bother to vote. Now, thanks to our imprisonment in the European Union, those Governments make only a minority of our national law-perhaps as little as 16 per cent of it, if the German Government are to be believed. The majority of our national law is now made in Brussels, with your Lordships' House and Members of the House of Commons, for whom the people are allowed to vote, irrelevant in the process."

"The people have not yet understood that process, by which most of their national law is now made in Brussels and imposed on them here. Their political class, which includes the BBC of course, has done a brilliant job by simply refusing to reveal how the EU's legislative process makes our law. I have said it before in your Lordships' House, and I will go on saying it until the frightening truth reaches our people. EU laws are proposed in secret by the unelected bureaucracy, the European Commission. Those laws are then negotiated, still in secret, in a shadowy body called COREPER, the Committee of Permanent Representatives, consisting of bureaucrats from the nation states. They then go to the Council of Ministers from the nation states, where the UK has some 8 per cent of the votes, and to the European Parliament for final decision. The European Parliament, to which we elect MEPs, cannot propose EU legislation; it can only delay it. Of course, it does not do much of that because it does not want to derail its famous gravy train. Again, all our UK MEPs put together have only some 8 per cent of the votes in a process that now makes most of our law. So the European Parliament is a democratic sham, and was designed to be so by the founders of the project of European integration."

"It is safe to say yet again that our membership of the European Union has removed our democracy; it has taken away the right of the British people to elect and dismiss those who make their laws. Our system of representative parliamentary democracy, for which millions have died over hundreds of years, has been frittered away. It no longer serves the people. That is why the time has come to give power back to the people. They deserve it anyway; it is their power and it belongs to them. Before long their anger will overflow if they do not get it back."