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I suspect that Mr Ritchie knows his argument is a piece of utter nonsense. There’s all the difference in the world between the wholesale surrender of sovereign power over the country’s law-making and law-interpreting which the European Communities Act effected and the kind of limited delegation of power for specific purposes or periods of time such as he apparently alludes to. I note by the way that he doesn’t give any examples, presumably so as not to make the reductio ad absurdum too obvious. The unique and potentially irreversible nature of the surrender was well understood in 1973 (although to hear some people talk now, you’d hardly think so): that was why Heath’s “negotiations” and Wilson’s “renegotiations” three years later had to be attended by so much secrecy and deceit. It was well understood during the Maastricht debates in the early 90s. And it has been the direct cause of the destruction of two prime ministerial careers and a contributing factor to that of two others (those of Heath and Major). This scarcely looks like a normal feature of the British constitutional landscape, writ just a little large.