Sir, - In her analysis of the Belfast Agreement (The Irish Times May 8th) Geraldine Kennedy says "The replacement of Section 75 with the principle of consent is revolutionary in British constitutional terms. Northern Ireland will have a unique status within the United Kingdom because, for the first time, the people, rather than the Parliament, will be sovereign and supreme".
This may be revolutionary in relation to Northern Ireland, but it is not unprecedented. The current Scotland Bill contains no equivalent of Section 75, although its predecessor in the 1970s did. Instead Westminster retains specific reserved powers and the Scottish Parliament will have complete authority over everything else. No-one pretends that it will just be acting as an agent of Westminster. Moreover it is implicit that the parliament can increase the range of its powers if the people so wish. The Scots never accepted the sovereignty of parliament anyway. Their equivalent to the 1688 Bill of Rights, the 1687 Claim of Right, asserted the sovereignty of the people, but this was made null and void by an English majority at Westminster which behaved as if parliament was sovereign in Scotland.
The old conception of sovereignty, developed by AV Dicey, has now been abandoned, and a good thing too. Dicey's ideas have always been a malign force in Ireland, justifying the intransigence of Irish Nationalists who insisted on a claim to territory which they could not effectively govern, and of Ulster Unionists who made a shibboleth of attachment to a Kingdom which had little interest in them. If the Irish referendums back the Agreement, we will enter a new constitutional era in which all of us in these islands can arrange our relations sensibly, and change them when it suits us. Sovereignty will no longer be thought of as a mystical essence, kept in a gilt box under the Speakers chair at Westminster, or Leinster House, but as the legitimate authority exercised by governments with the consent of the governed. We will exchange Dicey for democracy.
(Dr) Bob Purdie, Ruskin College, Oxford.