Because look in any history book and you realise they do anyway whether you like it if not. Also because the world order is changing, we live in a global economy and the tech elites are supplanting democracy?
Take UK manufacturing. In order to export goods in to the EU, UK manufacturers are now forced to make products that comply with EU legislation without having any say or veto over how that legislation is developed. It’s the very worst of both worlds.
Do you honestly think that global issues such as pollution and migration and tech and emerging markets dominated by China, India Brazil etc can be regulated and solved by one tiny country alone putting up imaginary barriers?
Atm, the EU group of nations combined is about the only body powerful enough to successfully challenge and impose fines on X and other US tech companies, restricting their access to European markets and tightening the enforcement of digital regulation.
By moving away from a block of centrist-left-leaning allies and rejecting their largely Christian democrat values; we have automatically aligned ourselves more towards the right and the USA! And look how that is turning out?
Total sovereignty is the mechanism which allows individual powerful states such as the USA to threaten, influence, or violate, the sovereignty of weaker nations. A rather pertinent point atm!
Everyone talks about sovereignty without mentioning the significant down sides:
In addition to individual nations struggling to resolve global issues, they can become vulnerable and unstable economically when they struggle to protect their economies from external financial shocks, eg pandemics or wars, plus the need to attract foreign investment can lead to a "race to the bottom" mentality in terms of labour and environmental legislation but hey crack on if you don’t care about the basic welfare of factory workers and the health and biodiversity of our rivers!
Also remember that sovereign states bear the full responsibility for their actions, which can be a heavy burden. It requires managing all internal affairs, from the economy to security, without relying on external aid. Let’s hope our governments and MPs are up to the job! And in times of conflict, we end up having to form alliances anyway. Far better to do so, and make these important decisions imho, at a time which is peaceful, rational and calm.
Also, with the existence of an agreed, external consensual governing body of law which applies agreed general principles relating to basic agreed standards on human rights and civility, individual nation states have a built in check and balance against individual governments committing human rights abuses against their own citizens. One to keep in mind imho if Reform win an election! 😬. Do you really trust Farage to do what is right for the nation above what’s right for himself and his cronies? We know like Trump, that his relationship with the truth is very strained.
You notice I used the word “agreed” there several times? That’s because this notion that, when we were an EU Member State, we had laws from the EU imposed on us and our government from high above is, and always was, utter nonsense!
In many cases the UK was the nation that introduced and wrote and developed the legislation that all then 28 (now 27) members sat around and discussed and fleshed out and agreed upon. We were always a leading light in that process and now we have left, we still need to comply with much of that legislation anyway (indeed post-Brexit we adopted huge chunks of it wholesale) but we now have absolutely zero say on the formation of new legislation in the future that will affect us just as much!
According to the House of Commons library,
”As of early 2026, roughly
36% of retained EU laws (now known as assimilated law) have been amended, repealed, or replaced by the UK government, with 64% remaining unchanged. While the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Act 2023 revoked nearly 600 laws, the majority of the original 6,900+ retained laws are still in place.”
Please explain to me some of the benefits of sovereignty that over-ride the above?