Danny Nicol – författare

The Law Lords in `Factortame' based their acceptance of the supremacy of European Community law on an 'entirely voluntary' surrender of sovereignty by Parliament. This interdisciplinary study tells the story, from the parliamentary perspective, of how Parliament's sovereignty came to be lost. It charts the evolution of MPs' constitutional understandings by analyzing the parliamentary debates on UK attempts to join the Community, the passage of the 1972 Act and the approval of subsequent Treaty revisions. The book's pervasive theme is the transformation from a UK constitution based on politics to one based increasingly on law. It assesses the extent to which MPs understood that EC membership entailed a shift in power from legislature to courts. This is a study with profound implications for the legitimacy of Parliament as a law-making body.The book also offers two comparisons. First the understandings of British MPs are contrasted with those of Irish parliamentarians, to establish whether Ireland's more law-based constitutional culture had an effect on politicians' understandings of EC implications. Secondly, the book analyses the history of the Bill of Rights debate culminating in the passage of the Human Rights Act 1998, to investigate whether (and why) themes of parliamentary sovereignty and judicial empowerment were clearer in this context than in the EC context.

In 1945 a Labour government deployed Britain's national autonomy and parliamentary sovereignty to nationalise key industries and services such as coal, rail, gas and electricity, and to establish a publicly-owned National Health Service. This monograph argues that constitutional constraints stemming from economic and legal globalisation would now preclude such a programme. It contends that whilst no state has ever, or could ever, possess complete freedom of action, nonetheless the rise of the transnational corporation means that national autonomy is now siginificantly restricted. The book focuses in particular on the way in which these economic constraints have been nurtured, reinforced and legitimised by the creation on the part of world leaders of a globalised constitutional law of trade and competition. This has been brought into existence by the adoption of effective enforcement machinery, sometimes embedded within the nation states, sometimes formed at transnational level.With Britain enmeshed in supranational economic and legal structures from which it is difficult to extricate itself, the British polity no longer enjoys the range and freedom of policymaking once open to it. Transnational legal obligations constitute not just law but in effect a de facto supreme law entrenching a predominantly neoliberal political settlement in which the freedom of the individual is identified with the freedom of the market. The book analyses the key provisions of WTO, EU and ECHR law which provide constitutional protection for private enterprise. It dwells on the law of services liberalisation, public monopolies, state aid, public procurement and the fundamental right of property ownership, arguing that the new constitutional order compromises the traditional ideals of British democracy.

This book argues that Doctor Who, the world’s longest-running science fiction series often considered to be about distant planets and monsters, is in reality just as much about Britain and Britishness.