ForumGarden

Yavanna wrote: Actually, we already have lost parliamentary sovereignty , as a result of a series of legal cases arising from the Treaty of Rome (1957 I think) and the Human Rights Act 1998, both of which state that where UK laws conflict or are incompatible with Euro law, Euro law applies.

To the extent that our laws fit in with European directives, we still have sovereignty ; for anything else, we defer to those directives.I think http://www.fco.gov.uk/servlet/Front?pag ... 7293025866 effectively refutes every word you've written here.

What I said was that the UK retains control of Foreign Affairs and Taxation, and that those are two key areas which define sovereignty. The Foreign Secretary covers both areas in detail on that web page:

"Because we have a veto in foreign policy there is only an EU common policy where we all agree. But where we don't, there is no EU policy."

"The Government negotiated successfully to keep a national veto over tax proposals."

We see sovereignty differently then ; my interpretation of it is "unilateral legislative self-determination" - not just limited to foreign policy or taxation.

As to taxation, we have entered into mutually exclusive taxation agreements with EU members to avoid taxation in two or more jurisdictions. Whilst we retain control of our domestic taxation regime, we have a bigger "umbrella" taxation regime to contend with.