Actually, although it had never been quite phrased that way before, the idea of certain statutes having a higher bar to meet has been around for quite a while.1
Lord Denning (MR at the time, I think) ruled in Macarthy's Ltd v Smith that Parliament would need to expressly repeal the European Communities Act 1972, and that the courts would then be obliged to follow that explicit legislation. This is merely obiter and comes about partly because of the 'construe' wording of the ECA, but it seems to have been more or less a settled point of law for the last 30 years - Parliament can repeal the ECA, but needs to say so explicitly. (Repealing the ECA would essentially require us to leave the EU/EEA, but could be done.)
Lord Denning was hardly uncontroversial - his time at the Court of Appeal is marked by some of the more amusing recent attempts to get around House of Lords rulings, with him writing some amusing slapdowns in the HoL - and he wasn't exactly strong on following precedent, but his words do seem to carry a lot of weight.
1 ETA: Note that this doesn't actually require Parliament to do anything harder to repeal the Act - it's not entrenching it in a formal sense of requiring, say, a 75% majority of both houses to repeal it. It just requires the wording to be explicit.
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momijizukamori
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Date: 2009-Feb-25, Wednesday 14:48 (UTC)Lord Denning (MR at the time, I think) ruled in Macarthy's Ltd v Smith that Parliament would need to expressly repeal the European Communities Act 1972, and that the courts would then be obliged to follow that explicit legislation. This is merely obiter and comes about partly because of the 'construe' wording of the ECA, but it seems to have been more or less a settled point of law for the last 30 years - Parliament can repeal the ECA, but needs to say so explicitly. (Repealing the ECA would essentially require us to leave the EU/EEA, but could be done.)
Lord Denning was hardly uncontroversial - his time at the Court of Appeal is marked by some of the more amusing recent attempts to get around House of Lords rulings, with him writing some amusing slapdowns in the HoL - and he wasn't exactly strong on following precedent, but his words do seem to carry a lot of weight.
1 ETA: Note that this doesn't actually require Parliament to do anything harder to repeal the Act - it's not entrenching it in a formal sense of requiring, say, a 75% majority of both houses to repeal it. It just requires the wording to be explicit.