Chris

Treaties do not de jure make a state non-sovereign. An individual treaty may be signed and then binned as required, and would not create a de facto end to a state's sovereignty. What has concerned me is the point at which that changes: at what point our membership of an organisation based on multiple complex treaties, some of which grant legislative competence and judicial oversight to supra-national bodies, means that whatever the strict legal definition of sovereignty may be, the practical exercise of it is fundamentally impinged.

Personally, I think Maastricht set us on that trajectory and only our exemptions from the single currency and the Schengen zone have allowed us this opportunity to back out of the project, difficult though it may be.