Human rights have had a fragile status in Britain, given the overpowering doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty, which has enabled a parliamentary majority to achieve any policy in the absence of entrenched constitutional protections. Plans to repeal the 1998 Human Rights Act are evidence of this. Dicey wrote that parliamentary sovereignty was tempered by the rule of law in the UK, but it is unclear from his work how the rule of law could operate to override the will of a despotic parliamentary majority. Brexit adds to this precarity, by removing EU human rights protection from UK law (which had something close to an entrenched status, while the UK was an EU member). This calculated deletion of fundamental rights – involved in the deliberate exclusion of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights from UK law post-Brexit – is almost unparalleled in the Western world (although perhaps the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which removed the protected status of the right to abortion from US constitutional law, comes close, at least for that right).

‘Law’ and ‘constitution’, like other concepts we use to make sense of the world, have a history.1 In the case of law, part of that history is the ongoing interplay between two different ideas. One is that law concerns what people should, should not and may do. In other words, law is ‘normative’. Another is that law is a product of human activity. Human beings and institutions can and do make and enforce legal norms.

The history of the relationship between the executive and the administration has been largely invisible to lawyers and constitutional law. The provision of the Magna Carta 1215 in which King John promises to ‘[ ] appoint as justices, constables, sheriffs, or other officials, only men that know the law of the realm and are minded to keep it well’ is not well known.

The year 2015 witnessed celebrations around the world of an event that took place 800 years earlier in a meadow west of the city of London near what is now Heathrow Airport. Then, the main participants were King John on the one side, and leading barons and prelates on the other. They had gathered to sign up formally to a document (which came to be known as Magna Carta) with the aim of forestalling violent rebellion against the monarchy. Eight centuries later, four provisions of the 1297 re-issue of Magna Carta still decorate the United Kingdom’s statute book even though the document was not a ‘statute’ (or, for that matter, a ‘law’) in the modern sense and the surviving provisions are of no practical significance.

This chapter examines the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty, the commonly used shorthand for the legal supremacy attributed to Acts of Parliament within the hierarchy of norms in the UK’s constitutional system. The characteristics of the doctrine are examined, alongside its historical origins and the crucial distinction between the idea of legal sovereignty and that of political or popular sovereignty. We then go on to examine potential limitations on Parliament’s legislative power, before examining and assessing contemporary challenges to the orthodox model of legal sovereignty. While the doctrine of legal sovereignty undoubtedly forms the backbone of the UK’s Constitution, it should be considered alongside the principle of the rule of law and – to a lesser extent – that of separation of powers. Parliamentary sovereignty is also closely aligned with the idea of political accountability. Each of these additional constitutional principles is considered in the chapters which follow.

This chapter introduces the central questions broached in the book. How does law distribute authority over public finance between constitutional institutions? How did that law develop? What role do economic, financial and administrative conditions have on the distribution of financial authority between parliaments and executive governments? Do judiciaries play a meaningful role in supervising public finance? Does it make sense to understand parliaments to 'control' public finance in the parliamentary tradition of government? The chapter opens by explaining AV Dicey's understanding of parliamentary control of public finance and his influence on later academic and practical engagements with the financial aspect of constitutionalism. Critical financial concepts are then explained, particularly the different functions performed by fiscal activities (taxing and spending), debt finance and monetary finance. The dominant position of 'central' government finance to the modern constitutional state is introduced and the distinction between 'parliamentary' and 'congressional' constitutional systems is clarified. The chapter closes by summarising the book's major claims.

Drawing together the book's analyses of public finance law and parliamentary constitutionalism, this chapter argues against the descriptive validity of the idea of parliamentary control of public money and observes the implications of that argument for democratic control of public finance. It begins by settling on an analytical framework for assessing whether parliament does indeed 'control' public finance built upon an idea of 'financial self-rule'. That framework is then applied to the legal and institutional practices which were observed in earlier chapters: concluding that parliaments cannot be said to have control of public finance in any studied jurisdiction. After discussing how broadly that conclusion can be generalised, the chapter evaluates different descriptive models of public finance in parliamentary constitutions: executive control, financial interdependence and parliamentary ratification. The chapter concludes that the latter 'ratification' model is most compelling and explains why that model secures a low level of financial self-rule.

Especially after World War II, the British visibly improved, in Hong Kong, on what was already a successful authoritarian–legality-based governance structure dating back to 1842. As one looks more closely at this extended, political–legal experience, it becomes clear these prominent governance achievements were built on particular British constitutional foundations forged over many centuries. Due to the largely unwritten nature of the British Constitution, the way was left open for a scholar possessed of remarkable understanding to analyze and describe – indeed, reveal – the essence of this historically tempered set of resilient governance principles. That scholar was Professor A. V. Dicey. Our analysis draws pointedly on the work of John Rawls as we analyze how “Diceyan constitutionalism” fundamentally shaped the development of governance institutions within the new British colony – working in conjunction with what has come to be known as “Chinese familialism.” Our aim in this chapter is to examine: how Hong Kong’s authoritarian–legality governance system has come to pass; the essence of that system; how thoroughly it has been stress-tested; and how well it may be placed to cope with tests yet to come.