Parliamentary sovereignty is one of the fundamental principles of the British Constitution, which underpins the legal system and gives the Parliament power to legislate on any matter. Dicey encapsulated this pillar of the Constitution as ‘the right to make or unmake any law whatever and no person or body is recognized by the Law of England as having the right to override or set aside the legislation of Parliament’. However, the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Community has markedly affected the traditional understanding of parliamentary sovereignty. It can now be argued that parliamentary supremacy no longer corresponds to the traditional Diceyan conception. Indeed, it may well be that the membership of the EU, along with developments in common law and the introduction of the Human Rights Act , have not just diminished but rather destroyed the supremacy of Parliament. The EC was established in 1957 by six countries who signed the Treaty of Rome. The states’ primary concern was to create a common market between the member states. This requires member states to give the law-making authority to the EC on a wide range of important economic policy issues. The United Kingdom joined the EC twice - in 1960 and 1967. New states could be admitted only with the consent of all member states and on both occasions France rejected the accession of the United Kingdom. British opponents argued that such transfer of political power was undesirable and was constitutionally impossible for the UK to honour the obligations EC membership entailed, since it had always been assumed that Parliament was the only body in the British constitutional system which can make laws and the accession to the EC might impose limitations on this principle. The European Communities Act is an Act of the Parliament which states the incorporation of European Community law into the domestic law of the United Kingdom. The interrelationship between membership of the EU and the Parliament’s legislative supremacy has occupied politicians, scholars, and commentators since even before the UK joined the European Community. Some have welcomed it, pointing to the economic prosperity and the lack of wars between member states. Others in the UK – and in other member states too – have expressed concern about the increasing dominance and spread of the EU’s reach. This was largely connected with the EU doctrine of supremacy which emerged in 1964 in a case called Costa v. ENEL in which the ECJ held: The transfer by the States from their domestic legal systems to the Community legal system of rights and obligations arising under the Treaty carries with it a permanent limitation of their sovereign rights, against which a subsequent unilateral act incompatible with the concept of the Community cannot prevail. The case of Costa v. ENEL established the supremacy of Community law. It also explained that regulations are binding and directly applicable within member states. This model of direct application of the Community law within the domestic legal order was supported by the case of Van Gend en Loos v.