Sheep magazine Archive 2: issues 10-17

...
If you think the High Court is interfering in DEMOCRACY, then
you don’t understand how Britain works [gulp]
If our own Government can be so woefully ignorant of British
history, perhaps it is time to adopt a written constitution to
serve as a reminder [for goodness sake!]
Geoffrey Robertson QC
The Lord Chief Justice of England has stopped the UK’s Prime Minister
from trying to overturn the result of the Civil War. That war, from 1642
to 1646 and which left one in 10 Englishmen dead in muddy fields,
established the sovereignty of Parliament, which Theresa May’s Attorney
General sought to circumvent by using an arcane power called the royal
prerogative to trigger Article 50.
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Artwork: Hans Holbein – adapted
As he should have known, this power cannot be used to repeal an existing
law; the 1972 statute by which Parliament took us into the common market
can only be repealed by Parliament itself. [why wasn’t this mentioned before?]
If the Government can be so woefully ignorant of our constitutional history,
perhaps it is time to adopt a written constitution to serve as a reminder.
The Attorney General was forced in court to concede that the EU
referendum was merely advisory – it placed no obligation whatever on the
Government to accept and act upon the very close result in which only 37
per cent of eligible voters wanted to leave, against 35 per cent of remainers
and 28 per cent who did not bother to vote (perhaps because they believed,
as opinion polls had indicated, that remain would carry the day).
Now that they have seen the economic and social damage that the
NOVEMBER 2016