I used to work as a scholar of Britain (specifically executions in Early Modern England, but you pick up a lot along the way) and I've tried to explain to a lot of people the amount of influence and control that the monarch actually holds. I'm not sure that this is such a bad thing. The Queen can't create legislation, she can restrain it. She is purely a moderating influence in this sense. She could, in theory, name new people to the House of Lords, but the Lords is no longer a hereditary body and there is a mechanism for the House of Commons to override the Lords.
Parliament does have power over the monarch in some senses, of course, in that there is precedent for Parliament changing the order of succession or introducing a regency. This happened without the monarch's assent, though admittedly over a hundred years ago. But the British constitution is one that replies on precedence, not a formal document.
I've characterized the Queen's powers as "reserve powers" inasmuch as, if everything goes wrong and Parliament dies from a meteor strike, the government still legally operate provided there is a monarch (even if you have to reach deep into the line of succession to find that person). By law she has to call elections within a certain amount of time. Obviously there's nothing to force her to follow the laws, but that's true of any country. She (or her heirs) are the leaders of last resort.
> I've tried to explain to a lot of people the amount of influence and control that the monarch actually holds. I'm not sure that this is such a bad thing.
This constitutional corruption of our laws by the most privileged family in Britain is indeed a bad thing, and one of the many reasons why the monarchy should be abolished.
Also, every member of the royal family should be stripped of their wealth and exiled.
> Also, every member of the royal family should be stripped of their wealth and exiled.
From a democratic/ideological perspective you might be right.
On the other hand, having a royal family it cute -- doesn't that count for something :)
I live in Denmark where we also pay the royal family some money, few privileges, etc..
My personal pocket philosophy is that the money we pay the royal family is the cost of a peaceful transformation to democracy.
A revolution like the French isn't free or without risks. Paying off the monarchy for generations to come is quite possibly cheaper.
A revolution would have incurred negative growth, and it's entirely possible that our economy would have been marginally smaller today, had we opted for a violent revolution.
Would be fun to see if anyone did that math? :)
In any case, if paying a bit of money and respect was the cost of a peaceful adoption of democracy it might have been worth it.
Just look to Syria, paying Assad an absurd amount of money to take a ceremonial role would probably have been a lot cheaper, and less risky.
Economically, it might. It is commonly asserted that the British monarchy brings in far more money than it drains in the form of tourism. I would be interested to know how well this claim stands up to scrutiny.
On the one hand, most of the physical tourist attractions could be maintained without monarchy actually owning or inhabiting them - indeed, the tourism value of Buckingham Palace would perhaps be improved if you could actually go inside.
On the other hand, perhaps that would ruin the mystique - and the mystique is certainly worth something too, as the wedding of William and Kate is estimated to have generated several billion pounds in tourist revenue all by itself, which is enough to pay for several decades of monarchy.
If the royalty went away and the UK took possession of its lands, castles, and holdings, it could make a killing off tourism to those private or semi-private residences. Other European countries that are no longer monarchies do this just fine.
Actually it does - the experience of visiting Versailles, a sort of preserved museum that exist solely for tourism, is entirely different from visiting an actual royal palace. Despite the historical significance it was one of the least memorable places I’ve been to in France.
Yeah, for one, you can actually enter the palace and not stay outside. The numbers of visitors in versailles absolutely dwarfs british palaces. I'm talking 'more visitors[0] than the british top 10 combined[1]'.
And the fee to enter is not cheap. 20€.
I think you've just proved the comment you are replying to correct though. You were still interested enough to visit knowing that it exists solely for tourism in advance, and presumably only came to your conclusion afterwards.
These are not the sorts of places that people typically visit on overseas holidays more than once. So once the ticket has been bought, whether or not it is "an actual royal palace" is irrelevant.
Of course people like to feel the glamour of being close to the mystique of living wealth, but once an attraction is firmly on the circuit it hardly matters. See Tower of London, Blenheim Palace, Edinburgh Castle, Hampton Court Palace, etc.
According to Association of Leading Visitor Attractions, Buckingham Palace would be around the 70th most visited
attraction in the country, hardly a sign that you need a living monarchy to sustain tourism - https://www.alva.org.uk/details.cfm?p=423
I did not write this as a defense of keeping the monarchy around just for the curiosity value, or from the raking-in-cash angle, just highlighting that the experience is quite different for visitors.
A lot of this land and property is privately owned by the royal family but leased to the government, I’m not exactly versed in UK law; but a governmental attempt to seize a private citizens land seems like it wouldn’t be the smoothest thing to attempt to pull off.
> The Crown Estate as a whole dates back from the time of the Norman Conquest.
In 1760, George III reached an agreement with the Government over the Estate. The Crown Lands would be managed on behalf of the Government and the surplus revenue would go to the Treasury. In return, the King would receive a fixed annual payment, which was called the Civil List. With effect from 1 April 2012, the Civil List was incorporated into a new system of funding referred to as the Sovereign Grant.
The Crown Estate is not the personal property of the Monarch. It cannot be sold by the Monarch, nor do any profits from it go to the Sovereign.
The Crown Estate is managed by an independent organisation, headed by a Board, and any profit from the Estate is paid every year to the Treasury for the benefit of all UK taxpayers. The Treasury is effectively the principle Government stakeholder and is kept informed of the estate’s overall business plans and strategies.
The Estates portfolio has a value of over £7.3 billion, from beef farms in the north of Scotland to Portland stone mining in Dorset. Windsor Great Park is the only Royal Park managed by the Crown Estate. All other parks are administered by the Royal Parks Agency.
> ”The Crown Estate is not the personal property of the Monarch. It cannot be sold by the Monarch”
Correct.
> “nor do any profits from it go to the Sovereign.”
Incorrect. Currently 25% of the Crown Estate’s profits are paid to the Monarch. This was raised from 15% in 2018, and is set to revert back to 15% in 2028.
"The sovereign grant was increased in 2017, from its previous level of 15%, to pay for extensive renovations at Buckingham Palace which are likely to run until 2027."
No, Buckingham Palace and other “occupied” royal palaces are not part of the Crown Estate.
”The palace, like Windsor Castle, is owned by the reigning monarch in right of the Crown. Occupied royal palaces are not part of the Crown Estate, but nor are they the monarch's personal property, unlike Sandringham House and Balmoral Castle.”
Did some research; think I’ve figured it out. See whether this is correct.
Occupied palaces, like Buckingham Palace, are owned by the reigning monarch ‘in right of the Crown’ (like you pointed out).
Similarly, the Crown Estate belongs to the reigning monarch ‘in right of The Crown’.
“In right of The Crown” means it is owned by the monarch for the duration of their reign, by virtue of their accession to the throne.
So, you are correct (and I was wrong) that Buckingham is not part of the Crown Estate.
Notwithstanding this technicality, would you agree that the overarching point remains that it isn’t as if “the money goes to the monarch for their personal enjoyment” (which is what I interpreted you implied), but towards Buckingham renovations, which is a property of The Crown[1] (i.e the state) and which in turn is embodied by the reigning monarch.
It sounds to me as if the monarch is like a custodian/shepherd of these assets for the benefit of the state (the crown).
Laws still have to respect the rights of the people, no? I’m not well versed in UK law, but the US, the legislature can’t just make a law making criticism of the government illegal because it’s a violation of our First Amendment right to free speech.
> Economically, it might. It is commonly asserted that the British monarchy brings in far more money than it drains in the form of tourism. I would be interested to know how well this claim stands up to scrutiny.
Only because of Hollywood accounting.
Tourists don't come to England to see the Queen. Tourists can't see the Queen. Tourists come to see the Palace. The Queen doesn't own Buckingham Palace. The government does. If the Queen were to disappear tomorrow, tourists would still come to England to see Buckingham Palace.
The question really is whether the existence of the queen is what provides continued value for buckingham palace — without the monarchy, it becomes another relic of a bygone era, with no inherent quality to attract tourists beyond its history and aesthetic. Visiting a “live” structure is an altogether different thing — this is where the queen lives vs this is where a queen once lived (as opposed to all the other places kings and queens have lived)
Counterargument: all those grandiose empty buildings. People still come to see our Place of the Parliament in Bucharest and ain't nobody bringing back Ceaușescu :-))
The question isn’t whether people would visit, but rather do they visit more because of the queen’s existence. That is, would be worth a billion rather than billions
The late author JG Ballard once suggested that the monarchy should be abolished, but that the British government should work with Disney to have lifelike robotic replicas made. Cheaper in the long run, and Disney World is quite popular after all.
Getting rid of the monarch as the head of state also means your nation has to pick a new head of state, somehow. Regular elections and an office and bureaucracy around that isn't free either.
But the Brits already HAVE a head of state what they don't need in effect is another. There is nothing the queen does that couldn't be done by existing members of government.
I don't disagree that a unified head of state+government would be unusual, but most parliamentary systems were also heavily inspired by the Westminster System, so that might not be a great argument one way or another.
Whom does the armed forces pledge allegiance to? In the UK, it's the monarch, not the government. That balance of power (military v political/legislative) gives you national stability.
You don't want one person having both.
Its the main reason royals serve in the armed forces.
> Whom does the armed forces pledge allegiance to?
Why does the armed forces need to pledge allegiance to a person?
> In the UK, it's the monarch, not the government. That balance of power (military v political/legislative) gives you national stability.
I don't think there's much evidence of that.
> You don't want one person having both
Why not?
> Its the main reason royals serve in the armed forces.
The main reason the royals serve in the armed forces is that the royalty (and even the broader nobility) is a remnant of what is notionally a warrior elite that is traditionally barred from servile labor but has position of authority ultimately grounded in military function. The substance of both the authority and the distinct warrior class is almost entirely extinct, but traditions remain, including the tradition that it's pretty much the only thing that looks like work that senior royals are permitted to do, as anything else in government would be seen to violate their distance from that function and anything else would be seen as demeaning the monarchy.
IIRC, it's because the British Army can trace its origins back to the New Model Army, so pledging allegiance to the Crown was more than just a formality back then.
In contrast, the 'Royal' Navy was created expressly by the monarch so allegiance is implied.
So if after an election there are two different coalitions who both claim to be the best chance at a stable government, who makes the choice to go with one of them, or to call fresh elections?
Under the Westminster system of government, I cannot see any alternative to having a seperate head of state that is not part of the government, even if they do nothing more than wake up every 5 years, appoint a prime minister and go back to sleep again.
> So if after an election there are two different coalitions who both claim to be the best chance at a stable government, who makes the choice to go with one of them, or to call fresh elections?
In a parliamentary system, the legislative body selects a head of government using a negative process, i.e. they choose the first best alternative that won't lose a vote of no confidence. You don't need 51% approval from parliament, you need to not get 51% disproval.
And depending on country, there are rules for in which order the various players are asked and how much time is allowed to pass for horse-trading and coalition-making, but generally the order is that you first ask the incumbent if they want to continue governing, and thereafter each party leader in order of size in parliament if they have an alternative that they think can pass a vote.
Also, in countries where coalitions are the norm, the various parties have aligned into blocks during the election campaign so that you can be reasonably certain that a vote for party A implicitly is a vote for their block.
> So if after an election there are two different coalitions who both claim to be the best chance at a stable government, who makes the choice to go with one of them, or to call fresh elections?
We, here in the rest of the world, use a magic number to determine that. 51% (or 50% + 1).
That was the case in the UK from 2010-2015. It's called a minority government.
Various factions horse trade until some coalition of parties has a majority, and then they rule as coalition. Members of both the Conservatives and Liberal-Democrats had cabinet seats.
The main downside to this sort of process is that sometimes negotiations take a long time. Belgium spent nearly two years bickering over forming their coalition in 2010.
> Sure, that works fine when one party has 50%. But what happens when no-one does?
Form a coalition that does or have new elections. You can even set a timeline after an election for a coalition to be in place or new elections are mandated by law.
> So if after an election there are two different coalitions who both claim to be the best chance at a stable government, who makes the choice to go with one of them, or to call fresh elections?
Why do you need to have someone make a choice? Have a set timeline for one of the other to secure the support of a Parliamentary majority or new elections are called by operation of law.
It is useful to have a hereditary figurehead to open flower shows and the like. It keeps the elected politicians from forming a personality cult, and gives them more time to govern. Pardoning turkeys probably isn't the highest and best use of the us President's time
According to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhyYgnhhKFw, the royal family brings in 160M pound from land property with a maintenance cost of 40M pound, and an additional 7000M pound from tourism
I expect to be downvoted for this but I think there is an appeal in an institution that dogmaticaly upholds a "higher" ideal of human behavior. They try to provide us with an example of how a hypothetical family with essentially unlimited resources that is born into this world with a social duty should theoretically behave. They also show us constant examples that human emotions are a factor regardless of your socio-economic situation. This provides the layman with an answer to the question "what would I do if I won the lottery and was instantly vaulted into the highest social circle?" Would you use your influence for the good of the people while maintaining a scandalous affair? Would you fall into the same emotional traps as the royals?
I think it's an interesting social experiment that may be worth the cost it requires to maintain.
What you describe is noblis oblige. It's a long standing cultural force ofarguable efficacy peculiar in particular to France/Britain.
Elsewhere, there are alternative viewpoints. The funny thing is that your proposed institution assumes the layman is the one who needs to be taught or reminded more often than not.
Stripping the Monarchy of their lands goes quite a bit further than just abolishing the monarchy. Removing the right to rule a county is one thing. Stripping a wealthy family from all their holdings seems to go a bit too far by any measure in a civilized society that values the concept of personal property.
>Stripping a wealthy family from all their holdings seems to go a bit too far by any measure in a civilized society that values the concept of personal property.
The concept of personal property can perfectly accommodate of a limit in how much a individual person can personally own, especially in regard to the distribution of wealth in the whole population.
> Stripping a wealthy family from all their holdings
An Act of Parliament could just ascertain that the Windsors exempting each other from Inheritance tax was unlawful, and ask the new Republican Revenue & Tax office to assess 40% IHT on every historical generational transfer of assets.
Just redressing the historical injustices that the Windsors benefitted from would strangely make them much less rich.
The way I read the GP's comment was that the meat of the argument wasn't the 'cute' part, it was the 'avoid a violent revolution' part. Wars are usually more expensive than peace.
We don't need a violent revolution, the people who place themselves above all other people and claim ownership of our lands and claim control of us as people could choose to denounce those positions and powers of their own will. No one is forcing them to claim sovereignty over other people, nor forcing them to claim sole right to income and assets that should belong to the nation.
Why would that result in the positions/powers being abolished, rather that succession kicking in?
Monarchy isn't a hot potato, that the current power-holder has to directly pass on lest it get "dropped on the floor" and cease to exist. Monarch is a belief of the people that a position of power exists and is "open" to be taken by a person with a claim on "right to rule." It's a thing you can convince people you deserve, at which point they put the crown on your head rather than shooting at you for wearing it. Succession gives a peaceful path for that transfer of power, but succession isn't the default; a power vacuum being grabbed at by random nobles—usually violently!—is.
If the current monarch stepped down, someone else without the same scruples would just step up. You'd have to, in effect, get every even-barely-theoretically-"righteous" noble to all agree to denounce the power, for the power to truly go away.
I have a bit of a hard time understanding this hobby, but people have traced multiple lines of succession to the same throne out for centuries, even in cases where the throne no longer exists. In many cases pretenders identified by this activity have active supporters even when they don't promote or assert their own claims.
Like there can be some guy living in another country who says "um, that monarchy no longer even exists" or "um, my ancestors lost that war a long time ago and I don't plan to reignite it", but still has some kind of association of enthusiasts who claim to actively want him on the throne. One such example is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz,_Duke_of_Bavaria who insists that he doesn't actually think of himself as the King of England -- his relative who last actually exercised that position was deposed back in 1688 -- but that doesn't stop other people from thinking of him that way. :-)
Wikipedia has several dozen people listed in the official present-day line of succession to the British throne and notes that a genealogist has claimed to identify over 1,000 people in that line.
It's possible to imagine a France-like republican future for Britain in which people's elaborately detailed and extensively researched pretense claims are not very interesting news for the overwhelming majority of the population, but it probably wouldn't be something that would happen overnight in response to a couple of abdications when a huge number of British people and a substantial number of people with claims to the throne are actively enthusiastic about the monarchy.
> nor forcing them to claim sole right to income and assets that should belong to the nation
In theory, it'd then be shared as belonging to the nation. In practice, you'd get the political class lining their pockets in the short term, and leaving us worse off in the long term.
Between letting successive populist governments have free reign over what happens to certain wealth, institutions and freeholdings and spunking it on policies during their 4 or 8 years in charge, and letting a somewhat stable (if sometimes self-serving) hereditary monarchy retain stewardship over the course of centuries - I'm inclined toward the latter.
Defending state supported inherited power, which has already shown to be corrupted and have abused that power, by saying it's "cute" is like saying pirates murdering and stealing are romantisised to being cute.
Don't confuse watching and enjoying Pirates of the Caribbean with thinking it's a good idea to murder and steal on merchant ships.
Russian oligarchs and mafioso also have their charm, but don't confuse The Godfather part II with a good idea.
Here in Spain the royal family is also paid in a similar way as Denmark and Sweden. However, they are corrupt and make deals with SA and other nations. They go on elephant hunts and are above the law as the Spanish secret service / police will try to defend them as much as possible. When something actually does come to light, they are allowed to leave the country without limit and live in SA with their millions of tax free money.
I don't see it as cute, more as a cancer. Sometimes they are benign but you still want to get rid of it in-case it actually ends up killing you.
It was just the previous King, Juan Carlos, his son (the current King) seems to conduct himself much better (no corruption, no elephant hunts, no tawdry extra-marital affairs).
But I do agree with you that the concept of monarchy (hereditary power/wealth at taxpayers' expense) has run its course.
Hunting elephants is legal and can help protection for the species. The real problem is in the context. Is going to an african tax heaven with some questionable people, suffering the second strange accident to the royal family in a short time, and justify the travel later claiming that he wanted to shoot an elephant.
EU project is only partially compatible with monarchy, you either have the power or don't and monarchs can only slowly lose more and more power to bankers with time. Thus, the current anti monarchy trend in many countries of Europe would be expectable. British probably see it coming and jumped of the train.
Not trying to put you down. I see the thinking behind your rationale, it is also somewhat detached from human emotional and political reality.
Being exposed to the atrocities of /most/ (im no expert) modern day monarchs and being an arab in the middle east, i find it REALLY hard to call what they do cute, or something math and money could fix. These problems, even dänmarks, evolved through strife, injustice and corruption.
Monarchies are necessary as-long as the region needs them .. i see politics more like an evolutionary process where monarchy is part of a nations dev stages.
In Denmark we have a constitutional monarchy... And while the constitution mentions the "King" many places.
We now have a Queen, and the role of the monarchy is entirely ceremonial.
Back in 1849 the Danish king signed the constitution, making the role of the king ceremonial, and giving us democracy.
Sure, this was in the aftermath of the French revolution. And hadn't the Danish king signed away his power we would likely have had a revolution.
Yes, monarchy in it's original/natural form is horrific. It's essentially a dictatorship, no different.
But I'd money and a ceremonial role can grease the wheels for a peaceful transition is that so bad?
In Britain they don't have a constitution the same way. But I see many events throughout british history where the crown gradually signed away power.
> Yes, monarchy in it's original/natural form is horrific. It's essentially a dictatorship, no different. But I'd money and a ceremonial role can grease the wheels for a peaceful transition is that so bad?
Not saying its bad, just saying they wont do it. Theyre already rich beyond imagining- sadism and abuse are rampant, and the public doesnt seem to care.
Like seriously, how much cash will it take to convince the saudis to go ceremonial? Meanwhile another gay person is hung and a dissident is assassinated. That all said .. seems to be what the region “wants” - displeasure isnt high enough yet for regular folk to demand change.
In arabic there is a saying “the people earn the ruler they deserve”.
Beyond the short term moral qualm .. its just a step in the development of these countries - it could - and i was - worse. Better wiser days will come.
It might have been a mistake to use the word 'cute', monarchies are an ugly business.
But countries where the powers in charge are closely balanced enough that the transition away from a monarchy to something else slowly (maybe leaving the monarchy itself intact as in the UK) are much better than the ripping off the bandaid approach seen in Germany or France. Moderate political change is generally a better idea than radical change.
I think 'cute' is probably a good word - amongst other reasons to visit London, a portion of tourists want to take photos with the silly people with tall red hats, see Buckingham palace and then buy a mug with a photo of the queen on it. People crowd the streets to see if the silly old smiley rich lady will wave at you from her golden carriage. People listen to the queens speech not because they look at her as a tyrannical dictator, but usually because it gives some of the population the warm fuzzies.
I'm not saying that's worth more than a fully functioning democracy, or that they couldn't monetise themselves, but I think this is what OP is referring to. Something can be both 'cute' and an ugly business.
The main thing standing in the way of republicanism in the UK is the simple fact the main alternative is an elected career politician.
And while nobody believes in that divine right nonsense any more, 99% of people who see the royals as corrupt and incompetent don't have anything better to say about our career politicians.
Nobody is forced to pretend anything. The monarch lost the ability to "rule" centuries ago. People can and do routinely call for abolition of the remnants of the monarchy with no ill effects, in fact, the head of Labour (the official opposition) is on film saying he used to be an abolitionist and by implication probably still is.
If the Queen had ever alienated the population the UK would have become a republic within a few years. Nobody actually thinks she rules anything which is why this article in the Guardian is news, and why it takes pains to point out how obscure this apparent veto actually is - apparently so obscure that even Parliamentarians themselves believe it's not used for anything!
The citizenship affirmation for British citizenship [0] is:
I (name) do solemnly, sincerely and truly declare and affirm that on becoming a British Citizen, I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, her Heirs and Successors, according to law
After which the citizen is issued a passport by Her Majesty’s Passport Office.
If we compare and contrast with America, nobody needed to swear allegiance to Trump at the border. They let in a bunch of people who would have actively and publicly wanted him gone. One of these two countries is pretending that birth literally should confer special privileges.
In America you swear your allegiance to a piece of fabric, and to support 'one nation under god' despite the fact that America is supposed to be secular...
Reality: These things are actually more based in culture and tradition than law.
Technically, it's to the thing for which the flag is a symbolic representation. One Nation, under God is arguably not an invocation of Christendom, but of deism, or the next biggest fish.
Spot on on the being based more on culture and tradition than law though.
> If we compare and contrast with America, nobody needed to swear allegiance to Trump at the border. They let in a bunch of people who would have actively and publicly wanted him gone. One of these two countries is pretending that birth literally should confer special privileges.
Trump is not equivalent to the Queen in role. The Queen is supposed to be a figured head only, a bit like the American flag. That's why this news is controversial because it's an abuse of position.
Real power in the UK rests solely in the House of Commons.
The last monarch that forgot that publicly had their head cut off in 1649.
That fact is celebrated every opening of Parliament when they slam the door in the face of the Queen's representative Black Rod, exactly so that she remembers.
You might not like the unwritten rules that govern the UK but they've worked pretty well so far and have been malleable enough to be reformed whenever there's been a problem.
The problem that comes into play with over-malleability is that you can end up weaseling your way into anything with enough time. Hard, explicit limits have their place, even if you do need to rein in the linguistic drift from time to time.
Ah yes, I forgot an absolute monarchy is exactly the same as a parliamentary democracy operating within a constitutional monarchy.
I also forgot that if you think Queen Elizabeth II could be considered a tourist attraction in England you also have to think that public hangings are great and that Salman of Saudi Arabia is also a total babe.
The implication that if you think the queen has touristic value you must also think that Andres Breviks crimes were great is just a silly false equivalency.
It’s possible to think that the queen has touristic value, could be considered cute, and probably needs to be further seperated from power, but I suspect that’s too much nuance considering we have already hit Godwin’s Law.
> The implication that if you think the queen has touristic value you must also think that Andres Breviks crimes were great is just a silly false equivalency.
Well that's a straw man.
> It’s possible to think that the queen has touristic value, could be considered cute
It is. And one of the Boston bombers was considered cute. It has no baring on whether he's a good guy, or someone who should be stopped.
Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy, no different from dictatorship.
What we have in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Britain is a ceremonial monarchy. The article is about how queens assent still granted the crown some indirect power (mostly through access to politicians).
But in practice, the crown has very little power. And is a culture institution.
If the cost of peaceful transition to democracy, is paying the crown money for generations to come, and giving the crown a ceremonial role. The might be worth it, even if the current King is a murderous lunatic.
(Future kings will learn that the monarchy needs to be popular, or people will vote it out of existence)
Sweden and Britain both have abuses of power. The Swedish king has used his immunity from prosecution to commit crimes. Sure, not murder, but he's done "fuck you, I can't be prosecuted for reckless driving. Luckily I didn't kill anyone, but no thanks to me".
Other parts of the royal family have claimed immunity when committing crimes (traffic violations), even though they don't actually have it.
So the king and his family have been abusing their power. It's a slap in the face of the whole country.
Look elsewhere in this thread for abuses of power from the British royal family. Also, you know, Prince Andrew…
Immunity from prosecution is hardly "some indirect ceremonial power", especially when it's has ACTUALLY been used to commit crimes and getting away with it.
And parliaments aren't? It's not actually clear to me which is better or worse over the long term.
Some are bringing up points on wealth and for me that feels like it stems from envy which is also pretty ugly. I postulate that striping the royals of wealth will make no one here materially better off.
I've noticed that in the last five years or so there's been a trend to automatically dismiss any criticism or argument with "you're just jealous" rather than addressing it's merits. Any wealthy person is automatically immune from any sort of criticism - because if you criticize them it's only because you're jealous.
It's an ad hominem attack, nonsensical, tired, and, as someone who has experienced a lot of wealth envy in the past, always strike me as so incredibly insincere.
> Some are bringing up points on wealth and for me that feels like it stems from envy which is also pretty ugly.
This idea that criticism of wealth must be just down to envy is really quite a tired stereotype.
It makes even less sense when there's a hereditary class of people whose wealth and power is constitutionally guaranteed and, as we've discovered, who use corrupt means to maintain this by intervening in the lawmaking process to neutralise threats to their income.
It's not envy to realise that there must be a better system than this.
There is a difference between abolition of privileges reserved to a caste and striping of wealth people regardless of whether or not anyone is granted the possibility to obtain the same wealth by legal means.
If you think the House of Commons was actually common men like you or I you'd be sorely mistaken, it was Knights and landed people (and i don't think very much has changed there). Make no bones about the UK parlimentary body, it is not of the "people" if that's what you are into.
Oh, no. I just wanted to share some nuance on what can stand behind a "measure in a civilized society that values the concept of personal property."
And it’s not like "civilization" was something one might really believe to stand on fairness, reciprocity and mutual care. That kind of things can survive in civilizations, and probably civilizations can’t survive themselves without leaving some room for these feelings.
> It is possible to negotiate a deal where they have no power and get to keep their properties but they have to maintain it themselves.
Sure, it might be possible to get a better deal. Or it might not, is it worth the risk?
Giving a ceremonial role is a pretty solid carrot.
And compared to violent revolution it's dirt cheap to offer :)
I'm sure it wasn't easy to convince the Danish king to sign the Danish constitution in 1849.
It's not a given that it could have happened peacefully.
In the end, it might not last forever anyways. It'll last so long as the monarchy remains popular, because at the end of the day the votes can change the constitution.
> I'm looking at you, readers from Ireland and France. :) Have at it.
They've already had at it. The French in 1066 and the Irish have invaded Wales and Scotland. So have the Dutch, Germans and Scandinavians for that matter, it's time to give someone else a run.
Historically, Ireland and France were England's sworn, mortal enemies (Scotland for a while too, but that's faded). Regardless of current forms of government, they have the best candidates to take the British throne by force.
A French or Irish monarch might also help bring UK back into the EU :)
After giving it some thought, I think I have the right system. After the invasion, the UK monarchy is no longer hereditary. Instead, the French and Irish parliaments, in a joint session, elect the British monarchs.
Everyone's happy. Ireland and France have their democracies. England has its monarchy.
We can even draft a constitution with bounds on who can become monarchs. For example, they might need to be citizens of former British colonies. That might help keep the former colonies happy. Keep in mind both Ireland and most of France were, at one point, colonized by Britain (for France: See Hundred Years War, The Black Prince, and Joan d'Arc).
> Sweden's current monarch is king because his ancestor was adopted.
Well, Karl XIV became king because he was elected by parliament, and then Karl XIII formally adopted him to make him and his family royal, not the other way around.
Either way, his son and grandson both married women that were descendants of Gustav Vasa in an attempt to bolster their claims, and that guy definitely took the throne by force.
So yes, you're right in that not every current reigning monarch has their position due to conquest, but most of them. And then that doesn't really matter, because the point I was making is that "rightful" is actually bullshit, it's 100% made up. It's political theater created to make it harder for presumptive conquerors to keep a throne, even if they have the might necessary to take it.
> On the other hand, having a royal family it cute -- doesn't that count for something :)
You might probably buy far more and far better distributed amount of cuteness without a royal family.
> A revolution like the French isn't free or without risks. Paying off the monarchy for generations to come is quite possibly cheaper.
Nothing is without cost and risk. Keeping a royal family includes a cost and it rise the risk inherent with any concentrated political/wealth power. It is not absolutely safer on all regard to go for a different kind of government of course, it’s a different trade-off.
>A revolution would have incurred negative growth, and it's entirely possible that our economy would have been marginally smaller today, had we opted for a violent revolution.
First, one might be willing to destitute royal caste from its privileges without willing to shedding blood and make widespread violence arise. The question is, if the people decide by means of a referendum to get rid of privileges, will the privileged few accept without trying to use violence to maintain their position?
Actually in France, they are several pretender to the throne[1]. It’s just that virtually nobody care.
>Would be fun to see if anyone did that math? :)
Maths on what? Societies are complex systems with many parameters whose evolution is subject to the butterfly effect. You can throw numbers in-between to decorate any thesis you would like to defend, it doesn’t give it any meaningful scientific credibility.
> Just look to Syria, paying Assad an absurd amount of money to take a ceremonial role would probably have been a lot cheaper, and less risky.
You say that like there was some kind of strictly internal consensus in the people of Syria to go for what happened rather than paying Assad. That sounds like an absurdly simplistic exposition of reality.
Monarchies tend to want to continue the family business. I’d expect them to learn from the tragedies of the 20th century. As a result of the fascist movements, the Italian monarchy lost the crown and the Spanish lost it but only recovered it because of Franco’s whim. If I were a king, I’d use whatever reserve powers I had to oppose that kind of future for my dynasty.
In that article, from an 80 old day comment of mine, you did not understand my comment. You told me to read the article. You don't understand what I mean by justification. There is a difference between prescription and description. That article was descriptive, not prescriptive. You cannot justify universals if you believe only particulars exist. You can only justify universals if you are willing to accept a metaphysical reality and provide a grounding for the metaphysical. Not everything is proven in the same way. The scientific method is good for studying particulars, but it cannot prove a universal. For example, science assumes the laws of logic in its process, which it cannot prove or provide a justification for. Also the scientific method cannot justify the scientific method. You on the other hand will probably say "because it works." Something working is a value-judgement, and that is not independent of ethics. It also assumes induction and regularity in nature, but you obviously haven't heard about the problem of induction. Science cannot provide a justification for induction. Science will also claim things like we know things from observation or what is in the sense data. Did we observe that or sense that in our sense data? I would say not everything is proven the same way. You can use science for some stuff, but not everything.
You cannot divorce Syria's situation from regional geopolitics. Simplifying it to not bribing Assad enough is a complete fantasy. Ultimately most of the problems stem from the hard realpolitik fact that the Syrian state have little military power to wield against significant adversaries. Their newfound alliance with Russia may be useful against rebels and terrorists and negating the meddling of the French and US, but it gets problematic when it comes to defending against Russian interests like Turkey and Israel. Syria is being carved up right now and no amount of bribing would help. Take a look at Kashmir if you want a better example of how to properly put down a protest.
> Simplifying it to not bribing Assad enough is a complete fantasy.
True,
I don't think anyone was convinced Assad would step down if given more time or money.
Just saying, that in that calculus offering a ceremonial role is still a cheap bargain -- assuming you can get the people in power to take the offer -- that's not a given.
-Living in Norway, whose monarchy is basically reduced to being on hand for when we need someone to officially open a new bridge to nowhere or provide apolitical statements in time of need, I am a pragmatic monarchist.
In the sense that keeping the royals around probably is cheaper and creating less fuss than becoming a republic. Precisely as the monarch is not elected, there is (the odd left fringe aside) very little controversy to be had.
Rather than electing a president (which, of course, will lead to a fraction of the population seeing their candidate lose), we've got our (ceremonial) head of state and everybody just deals with it. The monarch is very much aware that the survival of the institution he represents relies on him being apolitical and not attempting to boss parliament around.
Heck, the grandfather of the current monarch even won over a lot of the left when pointing out (in the late 1920s sometime) that he was the king of the communists, too - not just the bourgeousie, and asked the head of the labour party to form a government when election results indicated that was what the electorate wanted - despite attempts from the establishment to have him appoint anybody but the election winners.
Basically, as long as the royal family are as well behaved as they mostly are, they are probably cheaper and less controversial than any alternative. (While still being outrageously undemocratic, of course).
The main argument for abolishing monarchy around here probably is on humanitarian grounds - basically, it is hardly fair to have one's life cut out for oneself from birth?
After watching The Crown (it's fiction I know), being royal seems to me to be incredibly tedious, boring and downright limiting. Sure you can jet off to a nice country, but you are very limited in what you can do, where you can go and who you can talk to. Mess up just once and the tabloid media will be all over you.
Honestly would much rather be poor and free than be "royal".
I do think they serve a purpose, and tradition is important to many people (I know the progressive-types want to pull all that down).
The Guardian article of Feb 7th appears to talk at length about something that happened in 1973. It (article) is quite convoluted but it looks like the Queen was trying to preserve her privacy as she perceived it at the time, perhaps in a heavy handed way.
From the other Guardian article:
"The number of tenants on Scilly caught by the exemption is not known but has been estimated at 100.
One of them is a 78-year-old retired oil executive, Alan Davis. He has been prevented from buying the freehold to his 1960s bungalow."
The Royal Family may not be to your taste but these two articles are hardly grounds for insurrection.
I am genuinely sobbing about Alan the retired oil executive's plight.
However I find it hard to reconcile it with the fact that many/most of the nicest countries on earth to live in are constitutional monarchies. Including Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Canada, Australia, UK, NZ and Japan.
I don't know why this is, but it gives me pause in overthrowing the monarchy. It might be the existence of a monarch unites society in some way, or it might be that socities that move slowly rather than with revolutions tend to be more stable and comfortable.
I think, as with most things in the UK, we will get rid of the monarchy when it causes a problem that can't be dealt with in an easier way.
> However I find it hard to reconcile it with the fact that many/most of the nicest countries on earth to live in are constitutional monarchies. Including Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Canada, Australia, UK, NZ and Japan.
Because it has nothing to do with wealth?
The detrimental financial costs of monarchies are a drop in a nation's budget.
Just as the prime minister gifting his best friend 1 million euro per year from the nation's budget wouldn't really impact matters much overall in a nation that deals with billions each year.
It would still be quite corrupt, of course.
> It might be the existence of a monarch unites society in some way
Of course not, it is almost always a decisive issue in countries that have a monarchy.
In republics, almost everyone agrees that republics are better, but in monarchies the issue divides the population, and those that are in favor of retaining the monarchy are almost always traditionalists who desire to do many senseless things simply because they are tradition and are afraid of change.
History has always sided with the progressives, for no man wants change for it's own sake. When a man desire change, he typically has thought well of it, and desires a change for a reason, but when a man desires that matters stay the same, he very thought little of it, and wishes that they remain so for their own sake.
Sorry, I don‘t buy your last argument. You could argue the opposite:
When a person desires change, they either want it for their personal gain, or have seen the shortcomings of the current system and want change to get rid of them. Yet no system is perfect, and most changes have some tradeoff. When a person desires that matters stay the same, they are either profiting from the current state, or believe that the current system is better thought-out than it might seem at first glance, and are like this for a good reason.
This line of thought is based on Chesterton‘s fence [1].
Of course, a well thought-out change is still a good thing, and not all reasons for the current system are sensible. I count myself as a progressive as well, but it is not as clear-cut as you make it out to be.
> When a person desires change, they either want it for their personal gain, or have seen the shortcomings of the current system and want change to get rid of them.
The difference is that a man can rarely convince the others of a chance that is not in the interest of the many, but only in his own.
If there be legitimately flaws in the system that he wishes to address, it will be far easier to convince the collective by pointing out said flaws.
> When a person desires that matters stay the same, they are either profiting from the current state, or believe that the current system is better thought-out than it might seem at first glance, and are like this for a good reason.
And the big thing you leave out: that many, many men simply desire inertia for it's own sake and are afraid of change for no other reason than that it be change.
There are almost none in comparison who seek change for it's own sake, simply because they are afraid of matters staying the same.
> The difference is that a man can rarely convince the others of a chance that is not in the interest of the many, but only in his own.
So political propaganda rarely works? Every political action is sold as beneficial to the many, but how many of them actually are? I feel like political dynamics are rather a bit less straightforward than you're portraying.
I have never successfully seen, or even seen attempted, a sell that the republic be superseded by a monarch, and the orator be put on the throne with special privileges.
Have you ever seen a republic successfully transition to a monarchy by will of the people because someone sold it as an idea in the people's interests?
> Have you ever seen a republic successfully transition to a monarchy by will of the people because someone sold it as an idea in the people's interests?
You can probably squint at the Cambodian restoration and describe it that way.
While not a democratic republic, my understanding of the restoration of the Spanish monarchy to replace Franco’s fascist republic is that it essentially meets that description anyway.
There is no survivorship bias here without an argument that
conservative societies do not die.
My argument that the progressives are usually right is not empirical, but rational.
disclaimer: I should note that with “conservative” and “progressive”, I do not mean the U.S.A. identity politics terminology, that has little to do with either conservation or progression, but the simple definition of aiming for change or for inertia.
I would point out that Sweden is unique on that list, as although they do have a monarchy, the king hold no legal/political power, not even in a "symbolic" sense.
A potential explanation for the phenomena you've observed is that it's uncommon for new monarchies to be started in the 21st century, so the countries that still have monarchies are all countries that for the most part have had stable forms of government for many decades if not centuries.
Also there are plenty of poorer countries with monarchies: Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, North Korea, Thailand, Cambodia, Bhutan, Lesotho, Oman, Qatar, etc. (I'll admit it's a bit suspect to label North Korea as a monarchy).
> the king hold no legal/political power, not even in a "symbolic" sense.
That's not true. The royal family of Sweden have immunity from prosecution, fines etc.
And not just in theory - there are actual examples of royal family members escaping speeding tickets, investigation into hunting accidents, illegally using the secret service to raid the homes of people suspected of possessing potentially embarrassing photographs etc etc. (see eg https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1326783/How-King-...)
They also enjoy diplomat status while traveling abroad etc etc.
Not to derail, but I think you're correct in labeling North Korea as a monarchy. It's hereditary. Veneration of current and past leadership is at a level that might have embarassed the Sun King. The internal palace conflicts are practically identical to what monarchies in the past used to endure. They even go as far as to have a variation of "divine right" justified by the Juche ideology.
A Crusader Kings mod that would focus on the internal & external struggles of a cloistered totalitarian regime, like North Korea, would be very interesting.
Not as poor countries, but as poorer countries than the ones the parent comment mentioned. The GDP per capita of Saudi Arabia is around $23k - approximately half of that of Sweden, the Netherlands, or the UK.
Qatar is absurdly rich, but the wealth is inequitably distributed (unusually so). Although the GDP per capita is ~60k, the median household income (and the median per-capita income) are considerably lower than the countries the parent comment mentioned.
> The GDP per capita of Saudi Arabia is around $23k - approximately half of that of Sweden
Why are you mentioning nominal GDP, not PPP which is $55 grand according to CIA (which is more than Sweden's and UK's and just a bit less than US's)? If they raise their taxes to the level of Sweden they will have larger nominal GDP although without any increase in the purchasing power.
If you're suggesting some kind of causal link between monarchs and nice places, it seems a bit unfair to count "Canada, Australia, UK, NZ" individually, it kinds of pads the numbers a bit since it's all the same monarch.
Also, you haven't mentioned Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Grenada, Jamaica, Papua New Guinea, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Solomon Islands and Tuvalu. Are they not nice places, despite sharing the very same monarch?
Yes, such it is a no-brainer to not remove the foreskin of one's children, or that alcohol is a far more dangerous hard drug than many that are illegal, or that democracy should be proportional, rather than distrct-based, or that fines should be proportional to one's wealth or income, rather than absolute, or that cars should mandatorily have their lights on, even during the day, or that organ donation should be opt-out, rather than opt-in.
Tradition has always been worth more than sanity or even human lives to many men. — as man will resort to absolute madness, so long as the madness be a tradition that has gone on for long enough.
I still remember, all the way back in the Nixon era, my dad grumbling: "Most people just want to be ruled by a king."
But I think a symbolic monarchy could serve a useful purpose by giving those people a ceremonial role in return for promising that they will never attempt to actually govern.
I think the symbolism of the state (in this case embodied by the monarch, but it doesn’t have to be a monarch) as a separate entity from the “government” is very appealing. In this way, you can have certain offices that work for the state and others that work for the government. The state/crown side would be apolitical whereas the government side would be politically appointed. But it would be helpful to have the two sides explicitly separated to have minimal interference.
I have no idea if this is how the British monarchy works in practice, rather just the view from my side of the pond. In the US, we have the concept of career vs political positions in government agencies, but in practice, there is a great risk of interference between the sides.
I'm not going to try to answer the first, but as to the second question: Britain is exactly the example of this. The Queen (or King) is a symbol of national pride and unity. The British people regularly give her an approval rating of over 90%[1], which is astounding for someone who lives off of the public welfare.
I happen to agree with the GP that monarchies should be abolished outright, but it is clear that people feel strongly and build identities around ceremonial roles.
My reading of the article is that it's supposed to be a reveal of something that most of the British public aren't aware of. Given that they aren't aware of it, it's probably safe to say that it doesn't factor into their estimation of her. In other words, she might as well have not reviewed more than 1000 laws, as far as the factors that go into her approval are concerned.
If they weren't rulers, you could simply choose not to comply with those rules you found irrelevant or misguided. I note that you felt constrained to add the bracketed bit -- I would submit that that's the fig leaf.
You can argue that the doctor is being helpful when they tell a four-year-old "this won't hurt a bit", but the naked truth is that it's a lie, and the child has no actual choice in the matter. Similarly, you can argue that your MP or state senator has your best interests at heart (and some may!), but that doesn't mean they don't rule you.
The rule is by consensus in a democracy, law is an expression of that consensus. The constraint comes from the people, the demos, and not from some tyrant.
MPs are supposed to work for us, those with power wish to reduce the scope of "us" and some MPs are there specifically to enable that. But anti-democratic MPs doesn't alter the lack of rulers in a proper democracy it just changes whether our (UK) political system is a proper democracy or not.
What turmoil would you genuinely believe would follow?
The more absurd thing, in my mind, is that citizens of dozens of countries, including first world nations like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, consent to having the monarchy, even though it is largely ceremonial. Certainly no one believes it creates stability, nor that turmoil would ensue if they abandoned it.
Well the main source of turmoil would be in replacing the office since theoretically all the powers in the country devolve from the head of state.
I gotta say that I find the rabid anti-monarchal take a lot of americans have online kinda weird. I wouldn't say I feel "ruled" in any real sense by the British crown even though it is technically true. The Prime Minister and the House of Commons are where the actual legislative power rests and as much as the Governor-General is technically the commander in chief I highly doubt if she called for a revolution against the civilian government that would get any traction.
Furthermore I gotta say that given a lot of the other options I LIKE the hoky kind of odd but deeply rooted ceremony that surrounds our governmental proceedings.
Is it silly that the prime minister has to be presented to the Governor-General to get invested and leads a Privy Council (and for that matter is called a Prime Minister)? Yeah, but it's been WORKING that way for a long time and that inertia is important, especially I think nowadays with a lot of uncertainty from the largest democracy in the world.
>Well the main source of turmoil would be in replacing the office since theoretically all the powers in the country devolve from the head of state.
If we just need somewhere for power to divest from, then hand it over to the royal Corgis. If you have to have the fiction of a figurehead to make your government function, better it be something that has no possibility of corruption.
The whole monarchy thing is BS. We/Canada can easily do without it. And remember we have to pledge allegiance to the "King/Queen and Her Hiers" when taking the citizenship pledge - which includes the wonderful Prince Andrew. Such bullshit to genuflect to such people. And the British empire doesn't exactly have a shining past with all their colonialism and what not. Why not just pledge allegiance to the Canadian flag or the Charter?
But every time we bring it up for removal there are excuses why it cannot be done. The Governor General et all are a cost center - not just federally but in each province. Or worse two factions aligned to removing the monarchy don't disagree on how it should be done and the measure fails (Australia). At least the Australians managed to remove 'Queen/Heirs' from the citizenship pledge and acknowledged that many immigrants who want citizenship came from countries in Africa and Asia that were colonized, whose people were treated like shit, and had their natural resources stolen.
Cute and hoky to some... but others are being asked to pledge to an institution that subjugated many of their ancestors. For no good reason. Even if you have not been subjugated, there is no reason to pledge allegiance to her.
Honestly, I lost all respect for her when she accepted the unlawful suggestion that she should prorogue her parliament. If she won't even speak up for the very democracy we rely then I don't know why we keep her. The £40M a year from the sovereign wealth fund could surely be used to better ends.
We should take the opportunity to get rid of the position of monarch since we claim to be a democracy. We could also modernise parliament when it becomes ours - things like ejecting people for jeering and interrupting would be a start, close the subsidised bars, ... make it at least have a semblance of being a workplace.
As an Australian, wtf are we doing with a monarchy? Makes no sense, it's just a holdover from the colonial past, bring on the republic immediately. (Anecdotally, the general consensus amongst my peers is that the Queen's death will be the trigger for this - no-one wants King Charles again).
As an Englishman - it's too deeply part of our culture to remove just like that. What would we replace it with? A President? How would that be different from the Prime Minister? It's not obvious how it would work, and it's not clear what we'd gain from that (except not having King Charles again). Who would the military swear loyalty to? How do we transfer hundreds of years of strong tradition into a new structure without breaking things? I know that smart people have thought of good answers to all these questions, but they're not part of the public awareness, they haven't had time to steep into the public conciousness (unlike republican ideas in Australia, which are pretty well-formed and accepted).
Because the powers they hold have to be given to someone else. Replacing them with an elected president or parliamentary appointed one potentially create there own issues and sacrifice the long term stability of a monarch.
If the crown was directly replaced with an elected president for instance, that would be an enormous amount of power for a populist leader to wield and the lack of policy responsibility would lead to populists leaders. If the president was appointed by parliament then there is opportunity for corruption.
So there would need to be far more drastic changes and many possibilities (like changing from a parliamentary system) would not be popular. Ideologically I don't think anyone should hold such power based on who their parents we're, but in practice I'm a soft-monarchists or conservative on the matter.
Edit - The powers don't have to be replaced, the holders of those powers do.
> If the crown was directly replaced with an elected president for instance, that would be an enormous amount of power for a populist leader to wield and the lack of policy responsibility would lead to populists leaders.
In practice, all of the powers of the Crown must be exercised, and must only be exercised, by the Monarch as directed by various configurations of notionally-subordinate officials (whether the Parliamentary majority or the Cabinet as executive committee of the Privy Council or...). Simply investing those powers formally in the institutions which direct them in practice would have no noticeable effect. Or investing them, with the same practical constraints, whether together or separately in, like, any random person chosen off the street. The advantage of a ceremonial Presidency in place of a monarch is that they could continue to do the ceremonial functions as well as signing where directed by the Cabinet, etc., without occupying the time of people with real and substantive responsibilities in government.
All abolishing the monarchy would do is enable people with more wealth and status than me, many of which who I can expect to not only hate people like me far more than the current monarch, but to have self and group interests that are directly contradictory to my own wellbeing, along with ideological motivations that, if carried out, would be extremely harmful to me.
At this point people who think the monarchy should be abolished get filed under "malicious actor who wishes to put themselves, or their ideological co travellers, as my master instead, or wishes to use the de facto power vacuum to enrich themselves at everyone else's expense", i.e. they put themselves into the "I would probably be better off if this person were to be dead" category.
Like the monarchy is not already richer than you! They definitely feel their status is above yours.
At least the new rich overlords wont ask me to pledge allegiance to them during a citizenship oath like the do in Canada. Not just the queen, but also to her heirs like the great Prince Andrew The Pedophile.
Just because Americans take their citizenship "oaths" seriously doesn't mean anybody else does. It's a tradition not a contract. Do US citizens genuinely worship their nation?
If you don't want a single person to rule over you then it makes more sense to just select a head of state on a criterium that anyone can see doesn't have anything to do with their right or ability to rule. If you ask me this beats accidentally giving the head of state some degree of legitimacy just because they happen to be elected.
About 40% of the public expresses authoritarian personality traits. From Wikipedia[1]:
> The authoritarian personality is a personality type characterized by extreme obedience and unquestioning respect for and submission to the authority of a person external to the self, which is realized through the oppression of subordinate people
Considerably more so-called progressive folks (and others) put their faith in US Presidents they favour, than do subjects of most Monarchs, let alone the UK Monarch.
The level of demagoguery I witnessed around 2008 and 2016 in the US was ridiculous, people were spellbound as if their leaders were Disney characters brought to life.
Most Democratic Heads of State are elected on highly superficial and preformative presentations of themselves, effectively the result of giant PR and communications mechanations.
Other Heads of State - like Von der Leyen in the EU, have barely any democratic legitimacy.
QE2 has a narrow range of power, and she's actually done a pretty good job at it frankly, giving legitimacy to the notion that there is likely a lot that people can be brought up into. It's obviously not something that one would create from nothing in 2020, nor would anyone want more power bestowed than they have, but it works fine.
The US has Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump, the UK is stuck with QE2 and Will and Kate. I'd take the later if I could.
I take it you've made the assumption that my 40% figure was somehow related to Trump's approval rating, or something along those lines.
First, I am sorry that you're offended by a statistical figure.
Second, the figure was from research that was done in my grandparents' era, about three quarters of a century ago. About 40% of Americans displayed authoritarian personality traits.
Any assumptions you've made are merely coincidental. Have a nice day.
Everyone want someone to rule over them, except, perhaps, the libertarians.
Any bureaucrat of any government have more power in your life than you think. And over time, we're giving them more and more power to regulate our lifes. (I'm not even talking about politicians here, they're more powerful than any absolutist king of the history).
At best, it means the person a tally ruling over you loses the fig leaf (minor, at this point, because everyone recognizes it such) of doing it in someone else's name who has no real substantial role.
> I really don't understand why anyone anywhere in the modern world would want someone to rule over them
There's currently a government in Westminster making laws and dictating to us that the vast majority of the country didn't vote for. The public also has the power to change a monarchy, with the only real difference being that the "election" and transfer of power is less peaceful.
Democracy is of course better, but representative democracies in large nations are about as participatory as a monarchy.
It's more figurehead than actual rule of thumb and the transition from rule-control to being a legacy rubber stamp has been something that shifted a while ago.
Let us not forget the diplomatic aspect they afford and I'd say from that aspect alone - done more good than the elected politicians. Whilst the media love to focus upon the negatives, you can't overlook the positives and initiatives - the prices trust and other chartable involvements and then tourism. Though the diplomacy aspect is something that you have to respect the Queen and been a national asset in that respect.
So far from a no-brainier as you say if you look at their involvements beyond the headlines.
As an aside - if America had a royal family, the prospect of Trump on legal currency bank notes would be zero.
> It's more figurehead than actual rule of thumb and the transition from rule-control to being a legacy rubber stamp has been something that shifted a while ago.
TFA is literally about how it's actually not just a legacy rubber stamp, and the Queen gets involved more than a figurehead would.
> As an aside - if America had a royal family, the prospect of Trump on legal currency bank notes would be zero.
We don't know that. What if the Trump family was the royal family? I don't think this is an unfair question - Prince Philip is probably just as much of a racist as Donald Trump is, if not more so...
I can see you really dislike the whole idea of monarchy, but "grass is always greener on the other side". Republics, including mine, have a lot of corruption woven into their political systems. Many recent presidential elections around the world were very close, with the losing side relentlessly accusing the winners of corruption and conspiracy.
There is no happier afterlife once you get rid of a monarchy. You get a quasi-monarch with an opportunity to change him/her every X years and all the vile, disgusting, hateful polarization that comes with those elections in the era of Twitter.
If you kick out Elizabeth, I would probably offer her Czech throne in my turn. Can't be worse than who sits there today after winning a slim majority.
> one of the many reasons why the monarchy should be abolished.
Doesn't that just shift corruption to the next party? I don't see why logically switching the ruling party would abolish corruption. It might even increase it.
Speaking from a very corrupt eastern european country -- practice shows that each change of power lessens corruption somewhat -- who knows what next leaders will dig out, better stay safe. The longer same functioneers stay in power, the deeper is corruption.
there's never a guarantee that anyone isn't corrupt, but switching from an opaque, land-owning monarchy to something like the German presidency which has the same function (mostly symbolic, but has some emergency powers), at least gives clear transparent procedures, is accountable to the public in formal ways, draws a regular salary, and isn't living off inherited wealth.
What exactly is the justification for having those tasks, if they're deemed necessary, executed by some hereditary, secretive, uber-wealthy family rather than by someone who is actually a civil servant?
> What exactly is the justification for having those tasks, if they're deemed necessary, executed by some hereditary, secretive, uber-wealthy family rather than by someone who is actually a civil servant?
The easiest ways to corrupt someone are offering them wealth, opportunities for their children, or a popular reputation; the royals are relatively immune to all of those.
> offering them wealth, opportunities for their children, or a popular reputation
The government literally pays them and promotes them as a symbol of the nation - how is that not offering them "wealth, opportunities for their children, or a popular reputation"?
Monarchy is superior to democracy in a very important way. When a monarch sends you off to die in war, the monarch is spending their own resources: you. And therefore the monarch's own wealth and power is at stake. In a democracy the president sends you off to die at no cost to themselves and only really strands to gain from the kickbacks.
> And therefore the monarch's own wealth and power is at stake.
They have a tolerance of how much resource can be wasted. President's kickback isn't worth anything when the resource wasted can actually cause problem for the nation(Only at this point the monarch will start paying attention). So i am pretty sure they both are similar in this context.
The President is not the nation, and therefore problems for the nation are not problems for the President. It doesn't matter how much resource the President wastes, it doesn't impact their bottom line. This is especially true in democracies with term limits where the Presidential power has a known end, but the President's personal wealth does not.
That group of elected officials is still spending your life to enrich themselves at no personal risk. By nature of the monarch owning you and the country, if the country loses the monarch loses.
This doesn't appear to be true at any time in history for a plethora of monarchies. Do you have anything to support your argument save for your well articulated but poorly reasoned thought process?
It's axiomatic of monarchy, not a thought process or reasoned argument. If the monarch owns all the wealth in the country, then if the wealth of the country goes down, the wealth of the monarch goes down. If the laborers die, if the resources are mismanaged, etc. then the monarch's wealth and power diminishes (because the laborer's lives and the resources are the monarch's wealth). A monarch may choose to spend their wealth (including your life) to take over more territory, but they are spending their own wealth to achieve that goal.
This is categorically different from a democracy where the leadership's wealth is separated from the nation's. If the laborers die, the President is not impacted in the least. A President may choose to spend your life and money to take over new territory and increase their power, but they are spending your wealth to do it, not their own. If the resources are mismanaged you are harmed, not the President.
Firstly you are pretending that people are rational actors. This isn't necessarily true of people in aggregate and its sure as hell not true of individuals who have many wildly divergent understandings of the world, the probable end results of different actions, and desired outcomes including but not limited to aggregate wealth.
Next this doesn't even work out if we replace the monarch with an automaton which faithfully executes economic theory.
A monarch of 100M people might spend 10,000 people for some end that on net increases his wealth whereas a president of 100M might find the rest of the people so appalled at the 10k corpses that they vote him out of office.
If you look at how monarchs have actually and in fact spent the blood of their people historically we wouldn't have to argue theory. Throughout history monarchies have spent their people liberally in proportion to their ability to do so. You can look at recent history at a bunch of nations that are still technically monarchies you will note that their period of moderation directly coincides with the waning power of the very actor you claim somehow serves to moderate the state.
The rest of what I filled in on my own is reality. The motivations you propose constitute a limited theory on how leaders of nations behave. Comparing your theory to thousands of years of actuality ought to cause a rational actor to conclude your theory is at best so incomplete as to be useless and at worst completely wrong.
You appear to have imagined that I suggested there is one and only one narrow motivation for Presidents/monarchists regarding their own personal wealth and that single narrow motivation would be the only thing impacting their behavior. I made no such suggestion. Therefore all of your extrapolations are invalid.
> Monarchy is superior to democracy in a very important way. When a monarch sends you off to die in war, the monarch is spending their own resources: you. And therefore the monarch's own wealth and power is at stake. In a democracy the president sends you off to die at no cost to themselves and only really strands to gain from the kickbacks.
This understanding is completely outside of actual reality. The statement "Monarchy is superior to democracy in a very important way" goes on to explain why you believe the monarch has a greater incentive to avoid wasting the lives of his citizens. This isn't even close to true. A monarch who loses 1% of his "wealth" in the form of dead people still has the other 99%. A President can lose his job, his wealth, and his personal power for less.
A president is incentivized not to put upon the people more than they can bear with the understanding that all they have to do to be rid of him is check a different box next go round. A monarch faces the same risk but only if the anguish of the people is enough for them to spend copious amounts of their own blood in violent revolution.
This difference in resistance is the dominant difference in motivation NOT a proprietary feeling towards a kings subjects. This is well born out by an ocean of blood spilled foolishly by monarchies through history. I don't misunderstand you. I don't think you have properly understood history.
Because currently we have a ruling party, and the queen can interfere before that ruling party tables a bill to parliament.
Also, the Monarchy is effectively a mechanism for it's powers to be controlled by ministers, this means parliament can and has been effectively shut down temporarily to avoid debate at the whim of Government Ministers against the will of parliament itself.
Perhaps, but let's sort the problem at hand first?
The monarchy in the UK only seems to benefit themselves and tabloid newspapers. While the Queen has been a dutiful monarch (whos work ethic I happen to respect), the rest of her family seem pretty terrible with their crazy shenanigans.
She is the head of state, a job for which the president of the USA has to pull double duty while also being the executive. It is an incredibly tedious job, requiring her to go to endless factory openings funerals, and so on. She doesn’t really have to do those things, but she has done them dutifully for 75 years or so. As far as I’m concerned it’s amazing and probably does a measurable amount to contribute to the stability of the country. Can’t prove it, of course.
As an American citizen it is why I don’t mind presidents that I don’t like have a large secret service revenue, fat salary, and so forth both during and after their presidency.
That’s what the article at play here discovered: she makes sure no law can ever touch her pot of gold. Oh and god forbid any law force them to use a seatbelt.
Indeed, and they should all be targeted for removal.
One of the key problems in many human societies is that most of the wealth and power ends up concentrated in the hands of the undeserving few, who use it to further enrich themselves and their families, at the expense of everyone else.
Another key problem is that every now and then someone declares themselves more deserving than the current few who are in power and lines them up against a wall to be shot by a death squad.
Not advocating OPs approach, but I"m pretty sure you could find them guilty of at least one act of treason.
"For unknown reasons, Prime Minister Alec Douglas-Home was not advised of Anthony Blunt's spying, although the Queen and Home Secretary Henry Brooke had been fully informed. In November 1979, then PM Margaret Thatcher formally advised Parliament of Blunt's treachery and the immunity deal that had been arranged"
It's a model of monarchical disposal that has been successfully used by Germany, Greece and Romania.
Letting them stay and keep all their vast wealth would risk allowing them continued influence.
Also, the birth of the United Republic should involve a peaceful transfer of power, so doing this in the French style is completely out of the question.
You definitely need grounds to exile them / strip their wealth.
Taking away their political powers / their status as royals is one thing, but exiling someone is punishment. You can't just hand out punishment for no good reason.
If they commited crimes that were illegal at the time they were commited they should stand trial for that, but I very much doubt any of those are serious enough to warrant exile.
It is important to note that these "monarchial disposals" as you call them were used to get rid of monarchs that abused their powers, led their nation into wars, commited horrendus crimes, etc.
While you can take away their powers pretty easily via a law everything else, such as striping their wealth, would be punishment that needs to be justified. The Queen hasn't started any wars or genocides as far as I am aware, so how would you justify this punishment?
Leasehold is extremely common in UK property. Virtually all properties in multiple-unit buildings (flats/apartments) are leasehold, so “buying a lease” is pretty normal.
If the Monarch’s exemption to the normal leasehold laws was secretive and not known to buyers at the time, then it’s a problem.
>Also, every member of the royal family should be stripped of their wealth and exiled
I'm guessing you're not a Brit? A problem with that is the British people support them - about 72% for 21% against and I think they've been clearly in favour for at least the last century. So you can't really do it unless you get a dictatorship in to go against the people.
> Btw, Can the brit people name any other candidate to be the queen or the king? From the existing family or a new one?
Theoretically yes through parliament, who approves succession issues in a complex system with precedents that about 3 people understand. William of Orange becoming King is probably the most notable example. Recently there was a curios case where succession laws were change so that females inherit equally, but everyone with the Queen as their head of State hate to change their laws at the same time, had one country not done so, or the wrong gender babies been born at the wrong time along with a few untimely deaths, the countries would have ended up with different Monarchs.
I’m surprised, given recent presidential elections in the US and elsewhere, that the advantages of not having an executive that individual citizens can covet hasn’t become more widely appreciated.
I believe they tried that during the English Civil War which led the removal of the monarchy (and execution of Charles I), England being declared a commonwealth and the creation of a short-lived written constitution (the Instrument of Government). Apparently it didn't turn out too well because Charles II was restored to the throne.
As I understand it, it is quite possible to do this within the rule of law. To avoid the monarch refusing to enact this, it would need to be done in two stages:
1. A new Royal Assent Act, that makes assent automatic upon a bill passing both Houses. Assuming this in itself receives assent, it would remove the monarch's power to veto or refuse a bill (a power that hasn't been used for over 300 years anyway).
2. A Republic Act, that transfers all powers, abolishes the monarchy, strips them of their wealth, exiles them, etc.
The underlying assumption of the parent commenter is that “rule of law” means something other than 50%+1 of the House of Commons voting something into effect.
For instance, if parliament passed a law allowing “The Purge” to happen yearly, would murders committed on that day be “rule of law”? If you don’t think so, perhaps you agree there are some inherent principles to rule of law that aren’t simply a majority vote of a legislature. (For instance, perhaps there’s an assumption that exiling someone who hasn’t committed any crime is a violation of due process rights, rights as a citizen of the country, etc.)
This is the major question that liberalism tries to solve. This is why in a liberal democracy, minority protection all the way to the individual is a top priority -- the 51% are not allowed to do anything they want.
I think what the other commenter was trying to say was not that it would be impossible to do so, but that it would not be "right", so to speak.
While you could of course exile them like other countries have done in the past, why would you do that? What reasoning would you use to justify exiling them, striping them of their personal property etc. ?
Abolishing the monarchy is one thing, it can be justified pretty easily, the interests of the people. Anything beyond that however would be punishment, what have they done that is currently illegal that warrants that punishment? Punishing them simply "because they are royals" doesn't really work out, that isn't illegal after all.
Technically just abolishing the monarchy / taking away their powers would suffice.
It wouldn't have to be deemed a punishment, merely a procedural item as part of establishing the Republic of Britain and eradicating any trace of royal privilege.
> Technically just abolishing the monarchy / taking away their powers would suffice.
It wouldn't suffice, because they still derive a great deal of power from their inherited wealth. What's the point of abolishing the monarchy if we permit them to remain as landlords for huge swathes of the country? Then they're still lording it over people economically, even if no longer doing so constitutionally.
I hope you'll excuse me for phrasing it this way, but it would not be a punishment only because a punishment is a lawful injury, and your "Republic Act" is decidedly unlawful: by interfering with the royals' persons, property, privacy, &c, without any clear finding of wrong-doing on their part, the act is offensive to the common law, the ECHR law, and other fancy international law. (Good legal scholarship has shown us in recent years that most of the ideas in the ECHR and other international conventions are derived from the English common law, a rich tradition of which you should be proud.)
I am no fan of the royals and other nobles and look forward to the day when they all work for a living and wear seat belts like regular people. Yet, we must acknowledge that rule of law means law for the bad, the useless, and the rich. The ends don't justify the means.
Sometimes, what you're describing is called "rule by law" to distinguish it from "rule of law", because one practical aspect of rule of law is that everyone is subject to the law, even lawmakers.
This is not an intuitive concept by any means, but it helps to think about it in terms of the origins of the common law: the underlying idea is that the long acceptance of something or practice of something by regular people is a sound basis for its legitimacy. This still finds expression in the theory (in the US, anyways) that the speed limit should be the speed at which 85% of people drive. On this footing, the legitimacy of law is more about observation than about the decision of a particular person or administrative body.
Some things to contrast with the common law are "positive law" and "statute law". Legislation passed by Parliament is indeed statute law; it's not common law. Yet, to a significant degree, common law ideas and ways of judging remain prevalent in the United States, the United Kingdom and the other English speaking countries. It's the common law that defines most crimes with which you'd be familiar. It's more relevant than you think.
Although Parliament is indeed sovereign and Parliamentary sovereignty is said to mean that Parliament can not be bound even by Parliament, there are contemporary limits recognized to Parliament's law making authority. Sometimes they are even called "constitutional", referencing the unwritten English constitution; and sometimes they are clearly linked to the Convention on Human Rights. Either way, what we see here is an assertion of the old idea of "transcendent law" that binds everyone, even the law makers -- and that is what rule of law is really about.
> Also, every member of the royal family should be stripped of their wealth and exiled.
With regards of being stripped of wealth, what makes the Royal Family different to other cases of inherited wealth? Should I not bother saving up money for my kids?
I think scale of anything makes rules different. How we look at Amazon is not how we look at your small bakery although they are both companies.
But, I think a lot of people are this extremist and abhor any form of inter-generational wealth. Basically, every individual should start from 0 and "prove" themselves. You are free to do anything except sacrifice and save for your own family.
> Also, every member of the royal family should be stripped of their wealth and exiled.
As a more serious response to this: to do so is applying a law change retroactively and flies into the face of any semblance of a nation ruled by laws. — what they are doing is not illegal as they did it, a such, they cannot be punished for it by a retroactive law change.
A new Act of Parliament would be needed anyway to establish the United Republic, it could be included in that. Perhaps as a 100% wealth tax on the first X people in line to the throne, or similar.
Drawing rhetorical analogies is one thing, but exactly which human rights do you feel would be violated by applying these proposals to the royal family?
Also just to note this wouldn't be done arbitrarily, but within a specific purpose of abolishing the monarchy and removing all vestiges of their power.
> Drawing rhetorical analogies is one thing, but exactly which human rights do you feel would be violated by applying these proposals to the royal family?
The right to not be punished by the state for anything that was legal at the time one did it, by way of a future law change.
Saying “It is not a form of punishment; it is simply a procedural change.” can be used to enable any such matter.
> Also just to note this wouldn't be done arbitrarily, but within a specific purpose of abolishing the monarchy and removing all vestiges of their power.
The same can be said about anything.
Let us incarcerate all those that have removed the foreskins of their children in the past, when it was still legal to do so; — this is not a form of punishment; this is simply to remove all vestiges of involuntary foreskin removal.
> Saying “It is not a form of punishment; it is simply a procedural change.” can be used to enable any such matter.
Yes but the converse is also true, claiming that something is being done as an unfair punishment, as an argument against it.
In this case, it's also worth noting that most of the monarchy's private assets are vast amounts of property and land, of which they are the landlords. The state seizing and administering this property for the benefit of the country, rather than to perpetually enrich this elite, is a public good.
Rather than taking this to be a punishment on the royals, consider it an anti-punishment on the people afflicted by their predatory rent-seeking behaviour.
> Yes but the converse is also true, claiming that something is being done as an unfair punishment, as an argument against it.
No, in this particular case, it can only be claimed if there be no law against it.
The principle is quite simple: no man can be punished for any act that was not illegal when he committed it, no matter the act.
No matter how unfair the punishment, if it were indeed legal as he committed the act, the argument cannot be raised.
> In this case, it's also worth noting that most of the monarchy's private assets are vast amounts of property and land, of which they are the landlords. The state seizing and administering this property for the benefit of the country, rather than to perpetually enrich this elite, is a public good.
Perhaps it is, and the same argument can be made for seizing the property of the very rich, but this is entirely unrelated.
The difference is that a new law can be passed that the rich should surrender their property, and if they not do so, then they commit a crime, at the time it is so written in the law books.
Likewise, the former monarchs can be punished for being unwilling to surrender their power if ever the law change, and it no longer permit them to monarch; — they simply cannot be punished for their time as monarch when this was still legal, under this scheme.
> Rather than taking this to be a punishment on the royals, consider it an anti-punishment on the people afflicted by their predatory rent-seeking behaviour.
The argument was about their exile, not their assets being seized.
Their assets can easily be seized without any retroactive application of the law.
Of course, if the new law target only the former monarchs, and not every similarly wealthy man, then it goes against the other human right of fair justice and æquality before the law.
> The argument was about their exile, not their assets being seized.
A fair point, I did pivot back from answering this regarding exile.
If we consider why a set of international human rights principles were pushed in the first place, it was to act as a preventative measure against totalitarian governments abusing their citizens, and in particular, was a reaction to how the Nazis brutalized and killed millions of people during and prior to WW2.
What it wasn't intended for, is restricting how exactly to transfer power within a state.
Article 9 of the UHDR states that:
> No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.
The key qualifying word here is "arbitrary". For ordinary citizens, this is taken to mean that due process and the rule of law must be applied. For a head of state who is ordinarily immune from prosecution (as the Queen and her family are), it can't mean this, because the normal due process doesn't apply to them.
So if Britain did abolish its monarchy, the only interpretation of "arbitrary" that makes sense here is that the monarchy be treated according to the protocols decided for establishing the new republic. And if this statute outlines a process for exile, then so be it.
(Conversely, if it says nothing about exile, but the new government attempts to do so anyway, then this may well be in breach of Article 9.)
> Of course, if the new law target only the former monarchs, and not every similarly wealthy man, then it goes against the other human right of fair justice and æquality before the law.
As noted above, this already doesn't apply to the royal family. They are protected from any legal consequences for their actions that would apply to an ordinary citizen.
Targeting them specifically would simply be redressing this imbalance of justice and power.
Considering the loose political funding and lobbying regulations in the US (etc.), both de jure and certainly de facto, the wealthy seem to purchase political power on key issues that benefit them. This isn't the same as the power in a constitutional monarch, but in aggregate it may actually be worse than one.
They "earned" it the same way billionaires earned it. By getting wealthy competitors to fight each other and consolidating their monopoly position whenever possible.
I view British monarchy as tyranny prevention mechanism. Democracies are notoriously weak and can collapse at any momemnt by a charasmatic leader. Any long lasting democracies need some serious mechanisms to squash the tyranny. In American version this is achieved by having 3 almost equally powerful branches of governments. In British version, this is achieved by subdued monarchie. It's much like injecting a dead virus in the body. As monarchie already exist in the British system, there cannot be a separate tyrant rising up. At the same time, monarchs themselves cannot become tyrant as they have been heavily subdued to essentially act as dead-man walking. In many ways, this is more ingenious than American system, although more expensive and less intutive. In American system, there is still a good chance that a single party can dominate all 3 branches and tyranny might still emerge. In Briish system, this is near impossible.
Why would you want a solution that makes one family be treated as if they're above everyone else by birth? Is that the signal that as a country you want to give your citizens? I cannot understand how people consent to monarchies in so called developed countries while at the same time making huge fusses about everything else related to equality.
>> In many ways, this is more ingenious than American system, although more expensive
Is it though (more expensive)? I've heard they spend 1.5 billion dollars per year for the president (flights, security, meetings, etc). And that's the explicit part; the implicit one is the election spendings which last year constituted 6.5 billion dollars; if they come from special interest groups, I suspect, they should be somehow payed back in the form of legislation, tariffs, taxes, and projects appeasing those special interest groups (so taxpayers will probably pay way more than what was donated).
Yes, this is very true. The Crown plays a useful and vital role in the Westminster system. (I'm in Canada.) It can't just be tossed without something to replace it. But I'm not sure the monarchy offers anything not provided by a nonpartisan and mostly ceremonial presidency, similar to Ireland or Germany.
Here’s my point of view: it would be extremely simple to change our system to give reduced powers of our Governor General to an unelected president named by our prime minister every five years.
But because the Canadian government rammed the constitution down the throat of the Quebec government, any constitutional change is now a political impossibility. And now Indigenous groups are demanding a seat at any constitutional discussion, which is absolutely appropriate but also fraught with uncertainty.
So the lack of change to our constitutional monarchy is not because we cannot think of how to replace it: it’s because Pierre Elliot Trudeau done goofed.
You're certainly right. It's generally agreed that Canada could become a republic simply by amending the constitution to outline a new law of succession that established a de facto presidency, that would be "heir" to the monarchy, and then advising the Queen to abdicate as Queen of Canada. Then the new head of state inherits the office of the Crown, and is now the President as outlined in law. Elegant, really.
But, politically, the unanimous consent of the provinces to do so is essentially impossible to obtain, due to the history you mention. Canadians also simply don't care much about this. My impression is that most people are basically republicans by sentiment, but their level of actually caring about this is near zero. I'm in that camp myself. I'd like a republic. But the headache of opening up constitutional negotiations? Gah! That has never ended well in our history.
Monarchy is inherently undemocratic and has no place in a modern democracy. I am quite certain Canada would continue to function just fine (or even better) without someone pretending they were divinely appointed at the top.
You'd have to be prepared to get rid of the entire concept of the "head of state". The USA has proven quite well that having the head of government and head of state combined has substantial problems. A head of government needs to be somewhat competent and deliver results, but a head of state needs to project "gravitas", "dignitas", and other virtues. In the case of the UK, the prime minister has been relieved of the need to project these qualities and be a "mascot", but a US president has not.
In theory, the people themselves are the source of legitimacy for modern governments. But the media and some of the population demands a figurehead that provides centralized moral leadership.
> It can't just be tossed without something to replace it.
Why not? I admit I'm more familiar with the Belgian situation than the British Crown, but to me it always seems not very difficult to replace the monarch with almost nothing. I don't see why we need any kind of president, even though that's what people always talk when there's talk of doing away with the monarchy. The real leader of the country is the prime minister anyway.
In Brazil in the 19th century liberal democrats thought a monarch was unnecessary, after 67 years of successful politics under a king. Upon abolition the country devolved into a long succession of military coups and dictatorial governments.
There have obviously been successful countries without monarchy, but it is very risky to say that a figurehead does nothing. Reserve powers are a pretty real restraint.
I think the political situation/crisis in Belgium have little to do with the position of the monarch, and more with the somewhat unique situation of Belgium. It's a small deeply divided country; many of the top parties in the 2019 election participated only in the Dutch or French regions. While regional parties aren't unique to Belgium (e.g. SNP in Scotland), the way the votes are split between the two regions is a pretty big problem, and much of the disagreement stems from which list (Dutch or French) people in BHV could vote. This is an issue that goes back to the country's founding in various forms.
> The Belgian situation seems fairly dysfunctional. Is the monarch completely absent from politics?
The monarch appoints "preformateurs" and "formateur" who are elections start talks between people from the different political parties and (try to) form a cabinet, in different stages of the process. That's where he (or possibly she in a few decades, when Filip dies or abdicates and Elisabeth becomes Belgian's first Queen, if that's still a thing then) has by far the most influence in politics.
Some people he shouldn't even have that influence, and I'm inclined to agree. In any case, finding another process for that is probably the most difficult issue to deal with in case we would transform to a pure parliamentary democracy.
Reserve power ... I don't know. I don't think he has enough power for that. Maybe symbolically, maybe that counts for more than I think. Some say the king and/or the whole royal family is one of the few things that still hold Belgium more or less together.
If indeed having a figurehead can protect us from civil war and other kinds of chaos, then by all means, let us have a figurehead.
The reserve powers of the Crown have been reduced even more in Canada than in the UK, and there are several cases in just the last decade where the Lieutenant Governor or Governor General has had to make a decision. For example, if there's a motion of no confidence in the first sitting of the legislature, and the Prime Minister loses power immediately, the right answer is contextual. Sometimes another election really would be appropriate, in many cases the opposition can form a working government, if given a chance.
None of these problems are insurmountable, of course. And you could just keep an executive -- I personally prefer just replacing the Governor General in Canada with a president, preferably indirectly elected. Still, patching the constitution would be pretty involved, if you wish to fully excise the executive in its current form from the Westminster system.
So if after an election there are two different coalitions with different Prime-ministerial candidates who both claim to be the best chance at a stable government, who makes the choice to go with one of them, or to call fresh elections?
This happens in countries with and without a monarch - Spain re-ran their elections in 2016 and again in 2019 because no party could present themselves to the king as viable (a.k.a a majority coalition). Israel, without a monarch, has been re-running their elections for two years now because a weak coalition forms, governs for a minute, and then falls apart.
Parliament. A cabinet needs approval of a majority in parliament. At that stage of the process, the monarch has no influence, even now. I'm not sure who decides whether or not to hold new elections, but I'm pretty sure it's not the monarch.
All the evidence is that you'll end up with something more like a Kardashian and I doubt they'll bring in the billions of tourism dollars world royal fans do.
Why? The Queen was not elected. She's not a dictator. The de facto head of state in Canada is the Governor General who represents the Queen. The office is, in practice, appointed by the Prime Minister. Also not a tyrannical dictator. (Except with her personal staff, for the last one.)
Nonpartisan in the sense that the Queen is nonpartisan. So of course, partisan. Still, nonpartisan like not publicly wading into political debates, and not opening up the office to the vulgarities of electoral politics.
For example, Germany elects its president by convening both the Federal and State legislatures together, who then vote. By pulling in all the regional parties and legislators, the President has to have broad support across party lines. It's also convention that the President doesn't wade into daily political issues. The result is a largely ceremonial office, usually held by a broadly respected statesperson with former government experience. Which is what you want for the "emergency button" you hope you don't have to push in the first place.
Monarchs are just as bad if not worse than dictators. There are also non-tyrannical dictators. The issue with dictators is an issue of incentives, not an issue of immediate result.
Unelected officials should never have significant power. This led to a harmful coup d'etat in Australia. It's not a ceremonial office, and simply the fact that the emergency button exists makes it possible for perversions to continue and cause serious issues (and it has).
Partisanship is very far from the only cause of dysfunction in governments. I'd argue it's not even the worst.
The difference between a Monarchy and a Dictatorship is a question of tradition and the concentration of power not the line of succession. North Korea for example moved from father to son as a Dictatorship, give it 5 generations and you could call it a Monarchy.
However, even if it’s generally accepted that the child or close relative of the current leader should become the new leader there will eventually be back and forth over time between the royal family and other members of government. In theory they might have absolute authority, but in both practice and tradition there will be many informal limits.
Dictators absolutely don't have absolute power either - they have to juggle it with the military, the private sector, and so on, at the very least. In practice, the concentration of power between a dictator and a monarch is very similar. There are monarchs that hold a lot more power than the average dictators, and dictators that hold a lot less power than the average monarch (Marxist-Leninist states such as the USSR or China have their dictator share quite a bit of power to the Politburo, lower cadres, and so on, for example).
In general, monarchies pretty much have had the absolute maximum of power concentration possible without disastrous consequences.
I would say it's not even merely incentives, it's about a free people controlling their own destiny without a self-appointed father figure. Both aspects are important. Would you rather have a paternalistic boss or the freedom to choose your own destiny in consultation with your peers?
And a republic. That said - what would happen to all the stuff owned by the crown?
I'm not sure if the postal service still is, and the prisons could probably be let go - but I think there's a lot of land, especially in the south owned by the crown.
Property owned by the Crown is not the property of Elizabeth, as a person. If QE II were to abdicate, for example, she would not get to keep all of it. It's the property of the Crown, the office of the head of state. It belongs to the state, in practice. If she's advised to abdicate, she would, and she's advised to transfer all Crown property to a republic, she would.
The royal family does have many billions in personal holdings as well, of course.
> Property owned by the Crown is not the property of Elizabeth, as a person.
The Crown and Queen Elizabeth II are different persons. Queen Elizabeth II is a natural person. The Crown is a legal person, a corporation sole – a corporation with only one member, who right now is Queen Elizabeth II. Actually the Crown is not a single corporation, but a number of legally distinct corporations which all have identical membership. There is "the Crown in Right of the United Kingdom", "the Crown in Right of Canada", "the Crown in Right of the Commonwealth of Australia", "the Crown in Right of New Zealand", etc. All up, there are 16 nations with Queen Elizabeth II as monarch, and each of those nations is a distinct corporation "the Crown in Right of X". But, also there exist distinct "the Crown in Right of X" corporations for each Australian state (6) and each Canadian province (10), and also each of the three British crown dependencies (Isle of Mann, Jersey and Guernsey). So there are 35 legal persons (corporations sole) "the Crown in Right of X", and one natural person who is presently the sole common member of all of them. Each of those 35 corporations has distinct assets, which in turn are distinct from the personal assets of the natural person called Elizabeth. If any of those 35 entities became a republic, the assets of the "Crown in Right of X" corporation would pass to its republican successor.
AIUI he was effectively disowned by the rest of them, for placing his marriage above the stability of the institution. It could well have led to a British republic. And the next king did pay him an allowance anyway, apparently.
Abolishing the monarchy would also obsolete the Sovereign Grant, so all the surplus income from the Crown Estate would go to the state without the royal family leeching their cut.
That said, there are some Duchies that are privately owned. In my opinion, these should be seized by the state during the establishment of a republic - if we're going to abolish the monarchy, we need to go the whole way and strip each member of all their inherited wealth too.
It's the very least they deserve, and would provide a much needed clean slate for New Britain.
One way to look at it is that with a portfolio of investments you want to spread your risk amongst different classes. If you are securing an IT system then you have defence in depth. If you produce medical devices you want to have physical and logical locking mechanisms (see Therac-25). The US style is to make everything elected: judges, sheriffs, presidents, governors, DAs and school boards are all elected. Which means that they are all vulnerable to the same class of failure.
Note: This particular role mentioned in the article, of providing consent/impact to certain broad classes of legislation, are not included in my argument above. I'm merely replying to your statement that an elected official is always better suited to all roles.
While what you are presenting is all factual and true, it completely ignores the new discovery that the Guardian has made: that the monarch has used Queen’s Consent, which was thought to be a mere legislative formality, to steer the government in a self-serving direction. We were not publicly aware of such a deep involvement.
> Obviously there's nothing to force her to follow the laws, but that's true of any country.
Not quite. The laws that are unenforceable, because they apply to the 'person at the top', act as a bright line; in any country with a sufficiently capable citizenry, this line is the indicator that the 'person at the top' needs to be made to step down.
Edit. I'm thinking of the Magna Carta as an example, where the monarch was held accountable by the barons who forced him to sign. Seems like the barons make my point, since they're not planning on enforcing their agreement within the legal framework. One of the provisions in that document was:
> Under what historians later labelled "clause 61", or the "security clause", a council of 25 barons would be created to monitor and ensure John's future adherence to the charter.[44] If John did not conform to the charter within 40 days of being notified of a transgression by the council, the 25 barons were empowered by clause 61 to seize John's castles and lands until, in their judgement, amends had been made.
Interesting, does that mean that the Queen has implicitly agreed to a lot of controversial legislation (e.g. Internal Market Bill, and Brexit more generally), or the process of the proroguing parliament last year? It seems she might be a lot more conservative (lowercase) than many might like to think.
The Queen’s job is to be above the fray of any particular moment’s politics and politicians. She represents the abstract institution of state, regardless of who is calling the shots today. In the same way that Americans can be loyal to America even if they hate the President... the British people have a specific human being to which they can feel the same loyalty.
I thought the Navy didn't. I recall something about how they weren't eligible for certain ceremonial roles that the army and RAF were due to never having sworn an oath to the crown.
> The Royal Navy is the oldest of the three services, and it was established by the sovereign's prerogative. For that reason, recruits have never been required to swear allegiance, but they do sign an attestation or engagement form on entry. The same applies to the Royal Marines.
I think they changed that recently- the first Navy veteran to be a Yeoman Warder ("Beefeater") at the Tower of London got the post in 2011, after the rules were changed to allow it.
Certain bills (e.g. financial) are by convention not blocked by the Lords and so once these final bill has been approved it is sent to the queen for her signature to put it in law.
The last time the Monarch refused to pass a law approved by Parliament was 1704
In my opinion? She would have consented to the final form of Brexit and the IMB.[1] I can't say about the process of proroguing Parliament, but I don't think she has the power to interfere in the running of Parliament. If she gave consent it was to the bill mandating Parliaments last no more than five years (which was a terrible plan) back when the Lib Dems and Tories allied.
Personally, I think that the best way to characterize the Queen is that she was liberal for the 1950s, but as times have changed and as she's changed she's become more conservative.
[1] EDIT: Because at the minimum they can be interpreted as affecting her finances.
You may have missed this but at one point Johnson was actively touting the notion of proroguing parliament indefinitely so that it could not meet and reject a plan to Brexit without any trade deal in place.
And then 48 hours later, as if by magic, that plan (which would have required the Queen to publicly assent to an overtly-political variation of current norms) suddenly vanished without trace or comment.
Unfortunately this kind of proroguing has precedent in the Commonwealth since Stephen Harper (likely a friend of Boris) prorogued our (at the time minority gov't) parliament in 2008 to avoid an election that would have put a Liberal/NDP coalition in power.
Our governor general (and hence the monarchy) rubber stamped it then. I've never forgiven the institution.
The process discussed in the article (the Queen's consent, as opposed to the similarly named royal assent) applies only to legislation affecting "the hereditary revenues, the Duchy of Lancaster or the Duchy of Cornwall, and personal or property interests of the crown" - arguably Internal Market Bill and Brexit would be out of this scope.
In practice it's mostly ceremonial. It's not ceremonial in the way that she could do it and it would happen, but is in the way that AFAIK they haven't in centuries, and starting it outside very exceptional circumstances would mean that power would be taken away quickly.
As an example of an exceptional circumstance, in a Canada a few years back there was a minority government. The opposition parties banded together and formed a coalition with a plan to take over as a majority.
The Prime minister moved to keep power by requesting the Governor General (Queen's representative) prorogue parliament.
In this circumstance, the Governor General accepted the Prime Minister's request, which ended up rescuing the Conservative minority government. But I think most people agree that if she had decided otherwise, and allowed the majority coalition to take over, that would also have been an acceptable result. So this was, indirectly, the Queen making a ruling on a power struggle between a minority government and a majority opposition.
Considering how controversial this is 50 years later I'd say they did a good job in Canada to be as apolitical as possible, because sacking a sitting Prime Minister is definitely picking a side.
The Governor General did what the Prime Minister asked her to do, which is what they always do. The GG does not act on the advice of parliament but rather on the advice of the Prime Minister.
If you presented an example where the Prime Minister told the Governor General to do one thing, and she did another, then I'd agree that counts as the Queen/GG exercising power.
The article I linked lists two such examples. More importantly, my point was that in this case, although the GG chose to do as asked, that was by no means a set outcome. If she had done otherwise, as happened in 1896 and 1926, that outcome would also have been considered reasonable, and most likely not resulted in a public outcry and overthrowing the monarchy.
I still think it was a bad call allowing Harper to get away with prorouging parliament twice and giving the cons time to paint a coalition government as somehow "unconstitutional" and "undemocratic".
This is exactly what this article is about, turns out it's not uncommon, bills have been held up or changes added before assent was granted at the request of the monarchy over a thousand times in the present Queen's rein.
That's like 150 times a year? Every 2 days? How is that 'exceptional'?
I wouldn't be surprised if the Guardian has a week of damaging headline from this.
Today's was the Prince of Wales added an exemption shafting home owners on 'his' land, causing people's homes to become worthless so that he can collect extra rent. A clear abuse of power.
> I wouldn't be surprised if the Guardian has a week of damaging headline from this.
Indeed. Apparently they are releasing this as a series. I am very curious to see what they have next. Though I have no idea about how actually damaging this would be for the royal family.
There is a common phrase bandied about: “Democracy is the worst form of government, besides all the others.”
It’s oddly used as a pro-Merica. To which I normally say the US isn’t a democracy, but a Constitutional Republic. I don’t know why I do that, it only causes people to dig in deeper to their position. Their argument generally boils down to the US has elections and elections = democracy.
I can even see hints of that in this thread applied to the UK, but I’m assuming those are Americans.
It makes me curious as a British Scholar would you call the government a Constitutional Monarch? Do you find it commonly referred to as a democratic monarchy or just a democracy consistent with what I tend to see in the US?
> To which I normally say the US isn’t a democracy, but a Constitutional Republic
It is a silly semantic debate. If you define "democracy" narrowly to mean only direct democracy, then no the US isn't a democracy. If you define "democracy" broadly, to include representative democracies with constitutionally entrenched protection of minority rights, then yes the US is a democracy, as are quite a few others.
Whether a country is a republic or a constitutional monarchy is rather orthogonal. You can have a representative democracy with constitutionally entrenched protections of minority rights, and with that you can either have a mostly ceremonial constitutional monarch, or a President. The later is a republic, the former is not.
I think the UK does fall short somewhat, in lacking a codified constitution, there is really no such thing as entrenched rights – other countries without an entrenched constitution include Israel and New Zealand. Then you also have countries like Australia, which does have an entrenched written constitution, but the rights protected by the Australian constitution are rather limited – protection against religious discrimination and the implied right of political free speech. But "democracy" vs "constitutional republic" isn't a good way of capturing those deficiencies.
> If you define "democracy" broadly, to include representative democracies
I don’t think this is a matter of being overly pedantic. What you have done is redefined “democracy” to “republic”.
To use a real world example you don’t find many historians that call the ancient republic of Rome a democracy, or a representative democracy.
A republic is just that, a form of government where the people are represented by elected officials/representatives.
Does the US have any characteristic besides elections that results in you calling it a democracy? Do you call China a representative democracy? They do elect representatives after all.
Yes, clearly I give democracy the narrow definition where the people directly manage the affairs of the State, not elected representatives. It’s not just out of tradition though it’s because other forms of government have other names and democracies from the beginning have nothing to do with elections or electing officials. For example in Ancient Greece, the original “democracy”, they had officials for certain purposes that were not elected, they were selected from the populace through a lottery.
> A republic is just that, a form of government where the people are represented by elected officials/representatives.
In 1999, Australia had a national referendum on becoming a Republic [0]–to replace the Queen with a President. The referendum was defeated, despite polls showing a majority of Australian voters favoured becoming a Republic. Most observers attribute the referendum's failure to disagreements among Republic supporters over how to elect the President – many wanted a directly elected President, but the model proposed by the government had the President elected by the Parliament instead. Advocates of the indirectly elected President model were concerned that a directly elected President would become a political office, and transform Australia's political system from a Westminster-style parliamentary one into an American-style presidential system or a French-style semipresidential one. (The fact that Ireland has a nonpartisan directly elected President while retaining a Westminster-style parliamentary system did not seem to be considered.) Also, some were concerned about the fact that the government's proposal gave the Prime Minister the right to sack the President at any time for any reason, although if sacked the President would be replaced by the longest-serving state Governor (which is a non-partisan position) not by a candidate of the Prime Minister's choosing.
If "Republic" means "a form of government where the people are represented by elected officials/representatives", what on earth was Australia voting on – they already have that. The fact that Australia already has "a form of government where the people are represented by elected officials/representatives", and yet isn't a Republic, is pretty clear evidence to me that is not what the word "Republic" means.
> To use a real world example you don’t find many historians that call the ancient republic of Rome a democracy, or a representative democracy.
The Roman Republic was really closer to a plutocratic oligarchy than a representative democracy. The system was set up so the ruling class (the patricians, and even the wealthy plebeian families) had far greater representation than the poor free masses (to say nothing of the slaves). It was definitely not a system of "one person one vote" (or even "one man one vote"). What made it a Republic then? It became a Republic when they abolished the Roman monarchy. It effectively stopped being one when the monarchy was de facto reinstated with the Emperors, although in the earlier Roman Empire, the Emperors still retained the pretence that they were merely "first citizen of the Republic" rather than monarchs (the Principate); it was only in the later Empire that pretence was dropped (the Dominate).
Actually, the early US Republic wasn't a representative democracy either, it was a plutocratic oligarchy like the Roman Republic was – most people were denied the right to vote. Many states imposed voting restrictions based on race, gender, literacy, property ownership, etc; generally speaking, only middle-to-upper class white men were allowed to vote, and representation was very often denied to women, non-white men, and poor white men. It was really only in the 20th century as those voting restrictions were lifted that the US finally became a genuine representative democracy.
> what on earth was Australia voting on – they already have that.
As you said they were voting to replace the “Queen” and become a republic. But for the Queen Australia would be a constitutional republic, hence the vote to remove the Queen to become a republic.
It goes without saying the Queen (Monarch)is not elected and Queen’s heirs will succeed the Queen’s powers. It’s not enough that otherwise Australia has an elected parliament, even dictators in Roman republic were elected.
Because the UK and Australian Constitutions provide for unelected monarchs they are Constitutional Monarchs.
The US isn’t a “representative democracy” it is a Constitutional Republic. The fact that slavery existed under the constitution and was later amended to out law slavery never had and effect of the constitution providing for a Republic form of government at all times.
The US also needs to be viewed through a certain lens: 1) I believe it was only the 2nd attempt in history at creating a Constitution; and 2) the US only became an independent county through war and treaties. Maybe it was a plutocratic oligarchy in the beginning, but they were still elected representatives making it a republic, and that’s exactly why democracies do not have elected officials and the people manage the affairs of the state directly or otherwise temporary officials are selected at random. And as much of a plutocratic oligarch as it may have been, King George laughed when he heard about the concept of the elected “President” after losing the war and he famously said if Washington actually does give up the power “he would be the greatest man in the World.”
> It goes without saying the Queen (Monarch)is not elected and Queen’s heirs will succeed the Queen’s powers
The Queen has basically zero powers in practice. Her role is purely symbolic, with no practical relevance. Her symbolic existence, whether it be good symbolism or bad symbolism, does not change the fact that Australia already has, in every practical sense of the word, "a form of government where the people are represented by elected officials/representatives". You can even say that her rule over Australia is democratically legitimate due to the failure of the 1999 referendum to remove her.
All the Queen's actual powers in Australia are exercised by her representative the Governor-General. She does not instruct the Governor-General what to do. Outside of exceptional circumstances, the GG does what the PM advises the GG to do. In exceptional circumstances (such as the 1975 constitutional crisis), the GG makes up their own mind what to do – they may inform the Queen of their decisions as a courtesy, but ultimately the discretion is theirs not hers. All the Queen does is appoint and dismiss the GG, and the Queen has always (in recent decades certainly) done so according to the advice of the Australian PM.
If the Queen is physically present in Australia, she can personally exercise her powers rather than going through the GG, but even there she is bound by the convention that she does whatever the PM and ministers advise her to do. In the utterly unlikely event that a constitutional crisis happened to coincide with a royal visit, she might be called upon to exercise some discretion, but I think in such a scenario she would quickly depart from the country so the GG could sort it out.
The only hypothetical scenario in which the Queen might have some real power would be if the GG and PM were engaged in a race to be the first one to sack the other – if the PM instructs her to sack the GG, and she knew the GG was about to sack the PM, she would have a choice whether to follow the PM's instructions immediately, or to delay doing so until the GG had the chance to sack the PM first. That situation has never actually happened (although in the 1975 crisis came close to that hypothetical without actually reaching it.)
She has some other extremely trivial powers – for example, when she comes to Australia, she doesn't have to produce a passport (indeed she doesn't have one) – which again, is primarily a symbolic thing. Anyway, at the age of 94, she has made clear she does not plan to ever come to Australia again, so whatever powers she has when physically in Australia are now exceptionally theoretical. We will have to wait and see who is her successor (most likely Princes Charles, although it is not impossible he could predecease her), when that is (her mother lived to 101, she will be 101 in 2027, but it is not impossible she might even live longer than her mother did), and whether that successor ever comes to Australia as King – it could happen that her death is followed by an Australian Republic, and Charles III or William V, King of Australia, might not make it here before one is instated.
> The US isn’t a “representative democracy” it is a Constitutional Republic
I'm sorry but the US government doesn't agree with you. To quote the educational materials the US Citizenship and Immigration Services provides to prospective US citizens: "The United States is a representative democracy." [0]
And the United States Congress doesn't agree with you either – to quote H. Con. Res 139 of 2003 (passed unanimously), the US constitution "established the United States as a federal union of States, a representative democracy within a republic." [1]
So, I think I will trust the US government and US Congress' position, not yours.
Beg you pardon, but note page 7, question 2, and I quote:
>The United States, under its Constitution, is a federal, represent-
ative, democratic republic, an indivisible union of 50 sovereign
States. With the exception of town meetings, a form of pure democ-
racy, we have at the local, state, and national levels a government
which is: ‘‘federal’’ because power is shared among these three lev-
els; ‘‘democratic’’ because the people govern themselves and have
the means to control the government; and ‘‘republic’’ because the
people choose elected delegates by free and secret ballot.
Nowhere does it say it is a representative democracy, but it does state there is the occasional town meeting which is purely democratic in nature.
It explicitly states a republic with a democratic character, specifically in the sense whereby the democratic part refers to that character by which the people are the ultimate source of control over the government.
Props for the citations though. I had to check. Also, note that Congressional Resolutions are a glorified instance of "Hey voters, we have an opinion!" and are largely irrelevant to anyone that actually is already a citizen. Many would prefer that Congress spend more time not making resolutions, and more time solving actual problems.
Now your 0th source is interesting, and I see no indication of when that document entered circulation. However, depending on the administration in power, or who has approval authority, it's best to just kind of average things out based on what you're trying to do.
Though note, if this document is part of the process of becoming a citizen, this is taking surprising liberties with more foundational documents, and shown to the right representative in a bad enough mood, that it may ruin a civil servant's day by having to be rewritten. It's a back and forth sort of thing.
In short, try not to take it too seriously, like those of us that obsess over documents do. It just leads to migraines and frustration.
> Nowhere does it say it is a representative democracy
I quoted page 8 saying exactly that! (Question 5, "The Constitution") "The original charter, which replaced the Articles of Confederation and which became operative in 1789, established the United States as a federal union of States, a representative democracy within a republic"
It says the US Constitution established the United States as "a representative democracy within a republic". This isn't talking about direct democracy at the local level – the US Constitution has nothing to say on that topic. It is saying that the United States itself, federally, is "a representative democracy within a republic".
> In short, try not to take it too seriously, like those of us that obsess over documents do. It just leads to migraines and frustration.
You claimed I was redefining words. I provided evidence that the US Citizenship and Immigration Service and the US Congress uses definitions closer to mine than to yours. You then tell me not to "take it too seriously"? Maybe you could just have said, "No, I was mistaken to say you were redefining words, you aren't".
Definitions are based on usage after all. If the way I (a guy in Australia) use a word is (roughly) the same as the way the US Congress uses it, that is pretty strong evidence that way of using it is mainstream and legitimate
And now I have to apologise for that, because I realise you are not the person I was originally talking to, but someone else. I should have been paying more attention before I spoke so strongly
> To which I normally say the US isn’t a democracy, but a Constitutional Republic. I don’t know why I do that, it only causes people to dig in deeper to their position.
Perhaps because this is both pedantic and wrong? A state can be both a democracy and a republic, and many are, such as the United States.
> A state can be both a democracy and a republic, and many are, such as the United States.
Always has been:
"But a representative democracy, where the right of election is well secured and regulated & the exercise of the legislative, executive and judiciary authorities, is vested in select persons, chosen really and not nominally by the people, will in my opinion be most likely to be happy, regular and durable." -- Alexander Hamilton, 1777
An Alexander Hamilton quote is reaching pretty deep. Ever stop and wonder why you would quote that and not the Constitution directly?
It’s because democracy doesn’t appear anywhere in the constitution. The law of the land, the very document that establishes our form of government doesn’t mention democracy, do you think it’s an accident or oversight of the founding fathers?
Article 4. Section 4:
The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government...
I don't know if the 17th Amendment is also reaching too deeply for you, but it does say:
"The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof, for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote."
You could make the case that the constitution originally didn't create a country that perfectly implemented the ideals of a representative democracy, but that's trivially true due to slaves and women not having the right to vote.
It may also be fair to say that the Electoral College is still a compromise between representative democracy and representation of the individual states, but it does nevertheless approximate a representative democracy, especially when the winner of the popular vote happens to become president.
Explain how the US is a democracy without providing the definition of a Republic and renaming that form of government as a democracy to suit your arguement.
Do you want a dictionary definition? Here’s the one from Google’s built-in dictionary.
de·moc·ra·cy
/dəˈmäkrəsē/
a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives.
You seem to think that you have some technical claim to correctness. You are in no sense correct, technical or otherwise. The reason that people probably get annoyed by your claim is that nobody likes a pedant, but a pedant who is not even correct by some pedantic argument is particularly irritating.
Moreover, nobody ever seems to subscribe to this weird definition where democracy is conflated with direct democracy except people trying to argue that the United States is not a democracy. I suspect motivated reasoning.
Explain how the US isn't a democracy without providing the definition of "direct democracy" and renaming that form of government as democracy to suit your argument.
In theory, I think it's possible for an anarchist republic to exist, where there are no elections or rulers, and also no monarchy or "private" interests owning the state.
I just watched Cromwell (1970) the other day and if you know of a decent but approachable popular history of the civil war and protectorate I'd love a recommendation.
I don't know much about it, but the anachronisms in terminology were pretty hilarious.
It doesn't go very far into the protectorate-- that's nearly always a separate book-- but I think that Christopher Hibbert's Cavaliers and Roundheads: The English Civil War, 1642-1649 does a really good job. More in depth but I think interesting to a lot of HN readers would be The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution by Christopher Hill.
If you have the time, I think that Veronica Wedgwood's (she published as CV Wedgwood) history of the era is pretty great. The writing is fun and engaging. The problem is, it's contained in four books:
The King's Peace
The King's War
The Trial of Charles I
Oliver Cromwell
I don't think that Dame Wedgwood is really someone that academics read anymore (she's definitely old school history), but her scholarship is good and she wrote wonderfully.
While I have your attention: Any books on the church state duality? As an American with modern freedom of religion, the question of belief is very different than it was at that time. For instance, while belief was deeply personal and spiritual it was also extremely political. I'm not necessarily asking for a discourse here on that, but maybe a reference to firm up my thinking about how it was viewed at the time.
It's another Cromwell bio, but I think I found a book that could answer your questions on church-state relationships:
God's Englishman: Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution, by Christopher Hill.
I can't remember any exact books on this, though it was basically the theme undergirding pretty much all of the politics of the time. Sorry I don't have more. It's been awhile!
> I've characterized the Queen's powers as "reserve powers" inasmuch as, if everything goes wrong and Parliament dies from a meteor strike, the government still legally operate provided there is a monarch (even if you have to reach deep into the line of succession to find that person).
Ignoring that the Queen and much of her staff would likely be dead, where exactly do you think Governments come from? Parliament would just reform and be recognized de facto until the laws were either reconstructed or replaced. Sometimes words have no meaning, and the queen has no practical power to do any of this, so it's basically irrelevant in my view.
> Membership is granted by appointment or by heredity or official function.
> Membership was once an entitlement of all hereditary peers, other than those in the peerage of Ireland, but under the House of Lords Act 1999, the right to membership was restricted to 92 hereditary peers.
Before the changes resulting in 92 remaining in the House of Lords, hereditary members numbered over 1200. Once in a blue moon the Conservatives would mobilise basically all of them and destroy any opposition to a bill in progress
So, 90 of those hereditary peers are elected, just, they're elected by other hereditary peers. So, just because you're a peer does not mean you have the right to sit in the House of Lords, whereas before you could. If I recall, you didn't have to ever sit, but if you wanted to show up, you basically could come in to vote.
The other two hereditary peers are not elected. They have some ceremonial role (though they can vote) that was thought prudent to retain. I don't remember (if I ever know) what it was.
>The Queen can't create legislation, she can restrain it. She is purely a moderating influence in this sense.
Assuming the only negative changes that can occur to a person or group's interests are from the government, this makes sense.
In reality, where we have enormous corporations who have the power and ability to negatively affect the lives of citizens in new ways previous legislators could not have envisioned, un-democratic checks against legislative action strongly benefit the powerful.
Except she has not exercised her right to stop the Brexit which is entirely damaging to the United Kingdom and which the population was lied into by their current prime minister Boris Johnson. She also will not abdicate to allow someone younger and with more sense to actually make the decision.
That's what I used to think, but with the increasing tensions and polarization I'm not entirely sure anymore. Well, my perception is that the UK is not as divided as the US is, but if it were, then a Queen picking a side and wielding her powers might see the side she picked cheer her on.
Utter nonsense for too many reasons to go into. You could just as easily say that the Queen needed to make sure it happened while parliament was trying to stop it.
Even if it were feasible, the solution to the Brexit mess certainly wasn't "have the Queen override it". (It's an interesting theoretical question though: at what point and how could the Queen have stopped it? I guess she could have rejected the Act authorizing the Article 50 invocation - at that point it would have been even harder to argue a good case for doing so. After that, the process was running.)
What did you make of the debacle of the Fixed Term Parliament Act and the government being left unable to call a General Election in 2019 because of it?
Supposedly it removed the power of the Queen to dissolve parliament.
Lots of British people, me included, were deeply alarmed by it. Parliament was essentially rogue.
I agree with you that it was a debacle. It was meant to hold together the Lib Dem-Conservative coalition and once that went to pot it should have been scrapped. I don't think that it removed the Queen's (technical) ability to dissolve Parliament, instead it removed the government's ability to ask her to dissolve Parliament. It locked Parliament into a situation where no one had the power to do anything more than keep the lights on. It was gross.
* Had the Queen tried to dissolve Parliament I think they would have ignored her.
The Queen can't create legislation, she can restrain it. She is purely a moderating influence in this sense.
This isn't really guaranteed to be a "moderating" influence except in the most technical sense. The current queen does not seem very eager to grab more power, but one could easily imagine a more devious and power-hungry monarch parlaying the ability to interfere with some laws into greater political power.
Imagine a Trump-type figure in England. Popular on social media, eager to bend the laws, and calling on the support of a loud minority willing to sacrifice the principles of democracy. Now imagine that figure is also the King of England, with the current powers given to the monarch. Why would you want such a hereditary system?
Britain should scrap the monarchy entirely while they have the chance.
You could say this about a president, too. If one president grabs more power his/her successor can be assured of trying to exploit that power. All of these systems rely on people respecting established political norms. There's no way to get around it.
I'm not defending the monarchy, mind you, I'm just pointing out that it doesn't matter if the chief executive is the monarch or a president.
In general it has to be said a President is more likely to try this than a constitutional monarch, given that [i] Presidential elections select for people that are ambitious, have an agenda and are good at getting a large proportion of the population to support it and [ii]the President has a lot more theoretical legitimacy and generally constitutional power to assume 'emrgency powers' or sack a government
Parliament has failed many times, including at least once in the last decade. When it does, the Queen appoints whoever can form a credible government to be the prime minister.
> When it does, the Queen appoints whoever can form a credible government to be the prime minister.
Because if she did anything else someone else would. Constitutions barely mean anything when tested, our unwritten constitution might isn't worth fuck all
The most obvious difference between the American and British legislative systems is the presence of a foundational document like the Constitution.
The British system is strictly about convention and precedent, whereas Americans have a little more explicit guidance from the Constitution.
I think what we've learned as Americans in the last few years is that it isn't enough to have a foundational document. Convention and precedent indeed play a large role in the function of how the well government works. Congress is now terminally defective, largely because of the loss of the norms and violations of precedent, starting roughly in the mid 90's.
Perhaps the idea that convention and precedent is the only thing holding the British system together makes it stronger.
> Perhaps the idea that convention and precedent is the only thing holding the British system together makes it stronger.
Coronavirus has been a pretty good litmus test for which countries have good governments, and which countries do not. The UK has consistently led the charts in terms of deaths and infections. I think it shows the fundamental defectiveness of the system itself - a defectiveness that has been pretty visible for years if you looked at the country with a critical eye, but doesn't seem to be often acknowledged, since english people have a cultural prohibition against complaining.
That's ridiculous - in the US, at least, our failure to contain the virus was clearly due more to a substantial portion of the population not wanting to contain it (and this ambivalence being correctly reflected in the government's actions) than any failure of governance.
Of course, these people were a minority, but that just leads to the question of the appropriate protection of minority rights in a democracy, to which there is no obviously correct answer.
Well, in the UK, there are quite clear policy failures that led to deaths (two late lockdowns, 'eat out to help out', etc). It's not hard to see if you look at the graphs, and match them up to when the lockdowns were put in place.
Polls showed that people in general were quite keen on lockdowns, as it so happens.
The data is also as close as you're going to get to accurate in the uk. Just on the topic of comparing graphs.. Again you have made so many assumptions.
Some countries have different methods for measuring covid deaths. For example you have to have tested positive before you died vs autopsy after vs if you died in a care home automatically covid.
I think you're being disingenuous, but there are few raw facts that are worth noting. First, UK excess deaths are worse than the official COVID figures would suggest. This is under-reporting - and it's actually public policy to only include those who die within 28 days of being diagnosed with COVID, so it's not surprising[1].
[1] This policy has some good technical reasons behind it, but its political use is still a bit gross.
This data is still not accurate, excess deaths is a very lagged dataset. Countries that have been upfront and honest with their numbers have high rates, another such one is Belgium. The difference isn't the government response it's the data.
Governance is accurately summarized as getting people to stop doing things they would have otherwise done, or to start doing things they wouldn't have otherwise.
In that sense, it is absolutely a failure of governance. People not wanting to contain it didn't happen in a vacuum... except perhaps a leadership vacuum.
I am English. I have also lived in Germany for several years. I can tell you that there is absolutely no comparison. Germans expect things to work, and write letters if they don't. English people expect things to be broken, and just want to go on with their day. Perhaps complaining is the wrong term - but for example, where my parents live, the train service has the trick of closing one out of two toilets on the train to save on cleaning. That would be literally unimaginable in any other western european nation, because everybody would complain.
This might be a North/South thing. Generalising massively - I often find that Southern English will entertain huge grievances but never actually do or say anything about them. I kind of conflate these types with tutting Daily Mail-reading curtain twitchers who decry the fall of their society, as they see it, but never raise a peep in complaint.
Up North, people tend to be much more comfortable speaking up and giving a piece of their mind.
Personally, I am a regular writer of letters of complaint, and frequent arguer in the street, haha :)
Drives me nuts when I see people complaining, but not then actually doing anything to resolve it.
You're probably right - I have never lived in the north. Always hear glowing reports. Daily Mail-reading curtain twitchers are a solid majority where I come from.
> Coronavirus has been a pretty good litmus test for which countries have good governments, and which countries do not... I think it shows the fundamental defectiveness of the system itself
Authoritarian states have been able to manage the pandemic because their residents must do as they're told or suffer. Many others do well because they have cultural cohesion and people are willing to band together for the greater good. That is to say, people must either be willing to act for the greater good or be forced to do so.
Failure to manage the pandemic is more a sign of a liberal government (unable to force) and cultural breakdown (individuals unwilling to act), outside of countries that are actually just not capable.
The UK and US aren't willing to enact forceful measures, which actually think makes them quite good governments, in contrast to China, for instance. The US, at least, has been in a cultural death spiral since the late 60s and completely lacks cohesion. I suspect the UK has similar issues, but I know little about it. That is our actual weakness that has lead us to be unable to manage this crisis. Our government being unwilling to force us is one of our primary strength.
The UK has also led the charts in finding treatments (eg dexamethasone), developing vaccines, gene sequencing the virus (regularly doing half of the global gene sequencing to find strains), and testing (ridiculous capacity of half a million tests per day).
Frankly in all of these measures of actual state response to the pandemic it has been a leader. It has had high infection rates, but there could be many reasons for that. The UK is never going to have a highly obedient population like in APAC countries, it also has a relatively high density, extremely low sunlight hours and prevalent vitamin D deficiency as a result.
> Coronavirus has been a pretty good litmus test for which countries have good governments, and which countries do not. The UK has consistently led the charts in terms of deaths and infections.
This is a rather silly metric. The UK is also one of the leaders when it comes to the vaccine rollout, far outstripping any European country, several of which could easily end up behind the UK in overall stats before this is over.
> The British system is strictly about convention and precedent, whereas Americans have a little more explicit guidance from the Constitution.
This is complicated by the supreme court which is far more political in the US than the rest of the anglosphere, to the point where it's arguably a third chamber of legislature. They have a lot more latitude to reinterpret the constitution as they wish than anywhere else and they provide the precedent that would very often be left to parliament in other countries.
Just to highlight the difference, if you asked a random citizen of Canada, Australia, New Zealand or the UK to name a single supreme court judge they'd probably be unable to.
> if you asked a random citizen of Canada, Australia, New Zealand or the UK to name a single supreme court judge they'd probably be unable to
Don't each of these countries feature sovereign Parliaments [1]?
Congress is not sovereign. It is one of three co-equal branches of government. This, the separation of powers, was a deliberate decision by America's founders.
There is an (appointed) upper house in Canada and the UK at least, that in theory can act as a check on parliament.
In the real world, separate from theory, the Westminster system seems to have evolved into something far less vulnerable to authoritarianism than the US system. Constant partisan conflict and strife and culture wars down there seem to have yielded a degraded democracy, with the presidency assuming many trappings of a monarchy.
At least the Crown is a symbolic monarchy without real power. I remember being absolutely flabbergasted with the
bizarrely reverent way Americans talks about Bush when bombing commenced on Iraq and Afghanistan in the early 2000s; the concept of a "commander in chief" and the general marshal tone of US politics around the executive are quite baffling. But I suppose it makes sense given that the first president was a general.
>There is an (appointed) upper house in Canada and the UK at least, that in theory can act as a check on parliament.
If anything needs reform it's the fucking Senate. Basically the same problems as the US Supreme Court has where whoever's in charge when people die get to pack the upper house of government. I'd happily take at least term limits but I feel like it should either be elected or produced somehow via vote share during the parlimentary election.
> > if you asked a random citizen of Canada, Australia, New Zealand or the UK to name a single supreme court judge they'd probably be unable to
> Don't each of these countries feature sovereign Parliaments [1]?
Australia does not have a sovereign Parliament. The Parliament of Australia is subject to the Constitution of Australia, and the High Court of Australia can and sometimes even does invalidate Acts of the Australian Parliament as violating that constitution. So in that regard, the Parliament of Australia has limited powers just like the US Congress does. The big difference is that while the US has three coequal branches, Australia only has two – the legislative and the judicial branches. In Australia, while the executive branch is theoretically equal to the legislative branch, in practice the executive is subordinated to the legislature.
Actually the question of whether even the UK Parliament is sovereign is debated. Keep in mind the UK has three legal systems: (1) England and Wales, (2) Scotland, (3) Northern Ireland. Northern Irish law is based on English law, so Northern Irish constitutional law has at best minor differences from English constitutional law. By contrast, Scottish law is a completely distinct legal system, with a very different heritage (based on Continental legal system, ultimately tracing its origin to the laws of the Roman Empire), and that includes a distinct body of constitutional law. And while it is true that parliamentary sovereignty is a fundamental principle of English constitutional law, its status under Scottish constitutional law is debated. In the 1953 case MacCormick v Lord Advocate, the Lord President Lord Cooper (the most senior judge in all of Scotland) said that "the principle of the unlimited sovereignty of Parliament is a distinctively English principle which has no counterpart in Scottish Constitutional Law", and left open the possibility that if the Parliament of the UK passed an Act which was a clear violation of the 1706 Treaty of Union which created the United Kingdom – for example, if the Parliament of the UK tried to abolish the independent Scottish legal system and impose English law on Scotland – the Scottish Courts would have the power to invalidate that Act. In practice this question is unlikely to ever arise, because it is politically inconceivable that the Parliament of the UK would ever actually pass such a law. (The case was about whether Queen Elizabeth II was allowed to use the regnal number II in Scotland, despite the fact that Scotland had never had a Queen Elizabeth I – the court ruled that the Treaty of Union said nothing on the topic, so the Queen's choice of what regnal number she used could not be said to violate the Treaty.)
To answer the original question, I definitely remember the name of one former Australian High Court Justice – Michael Kirby (who is famous for being the first openly gay High Court justice). I am a bit of a law nerd, but I don't think you need to be a law nerd to remember that.
The American constitution is notoriously vague. Perhaps the problem isn't that we relied on a founding document too much, but that that founding document didn't provide the foundation we needed because there's too many different ways to interpret it.
> Perhaps the idea that convention and precedent is the only thing holding the British system together makes it stronger.
This echos the Roman senate during the late Republican period quite strongly. They, like the British, depended on precedent (their "Mos Maiorum"). Like us Americans, once the social norms were violated things quickly devolved.
A lot of the British constitution is specified in the legislature. It isn’t precedent that determines who the next monarch is, or how frequently there are elections. Though there are indeed conventions like the way the House of Lords must treat budget bills.
>Perhaps the idea that convention and precedent is the only thing holding the British system
I still remember it wasn't that long ago the British System were laughed and attacked on HN for lacking a document like the Constitution. And how convention and precedent were antique.
Having said that convention and precedent aren't foolprove either.
"As long as human are involved it can always be corrupted."
I suggest if the UK adopted some reasonable constitution it wouldn't change a thing.
Unless some people hoodwinked some sneaky things in there.
But otherwise, it's moot: if you have a highly functional and credible judicial system, and a framework to work from - you don't really need a constitution.
Did they forget that? There's still the House of Lords and the House of Commons for a reason. The monarchy and the landowners are still a thing and are still a ruling class.
It seems like there are two groups of lords, one group has been heavily shown in the media(think Downton Abby or the aristocratic family having to sell or have tours of their estate). The other set of lords is not really shown in media and they are large landowners in London and other cities in Britain and are extremely wealthy and powerful, see the Grosvenor family - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugh_Grosvenor,_7th_Duke_of_We...
Not really. You don’t have to be a landowner or an aristocrat to become a lord. The ‘Downtown Abbey’ style lords, called ‘hereditary peers’ are on their way out, there’s not many left. Most peers are appointed by the government of the day supposedly as a result of doing something useful for the country as a whole. I think that certain members of the clergy become peers by default, likewise top judges, ‘The Law Lords’? Otherwise the majority of appointed peers, who are given the title of “Lord” or “Baroness” when they are appointed, are politicians that have been promoted out of the way of the young crew coming up, retired senior lawyers, judges, business people, doctors that sort of thing. Once appointed you are a Lord for the rest of your life.
So the House of Lords is democratic in the sense that lords are appointed by elected politicians, but its less democratic than say the European Commission, where commissioners are also appointed by elected governments but have a fixed term of office. Which is less democratic than the Houses of Parliament, which is less democratic than a proportionally elected government like the Germans have and so on, but I digress.
Basically its a continuation of the idea that the British state has had the ability to create Lords for thousands of years, but now they don’t pass the title on to their children and they dont get given a bit of land to build a castle on. I think there are probably a few hereditary peers that are actually just the great great grandchildren of very successful Victorian businessman, just because they have the title ‘Lord’ does not necessarily of aristocratic lineage dating back to William the Conquerer.
That’s completely incorrect. There are only 802 seats. 92 are hereditary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Lords. Just because you have the heriditary title of Lord, it doesn’t mean you are a peer of the House of Lords
The House of Lords has included many political appointees since 'Life Peers' were created in 1958. Hereditary peers were mostly removed from the House of Lords in 1999, though a small rump of 92 remained as a motivation to decide for the long term whether it should be appointed or elected.
Did you read the article? Apparently what is widely assumed to be a pro forma aspect of the legislative process has, in fact, been used to make substantive changes to legislature before it's even presented to parliament and this is done in a manner outside of public view.
So the Queen's advisers lobbied for a royal commission to not be possible to scrap by executive order (but it was scrapped anyway), for the royal estates to be exempt from road traffic regulation (all private land is) and some Queen's Estate representatives threatened to complain to a senior minister in a meeting with civil servants about the impact of a bill which the Queen gave assent to anyway. Over the space of half a century. If there are other instances where royal representatives were a roadblock rather than on of many special interests whose opinion they humour, the incentives for politicians to publicise them are strong.
I think that's more consistent with the monarch's impact being "practically nil" than her being the reason things never go people's way. There's an argument that's more legislative discussion than the representatives of a ceremonial monarch should be participating in, but you don't pressure civil servants by threatening to tell the Chancellor you're gravely concerned if you're actually pulling the strings.
On the other hand, is this process really that different than the usual process of legislation being crafted in private by people who aren't the Queen before it's presented?
It is worrying that the Queen can just say no before legislation gets off the ground, but that's true of many of the more powerful MPs, too. I'm in the US, so I'm not exactly familiar with the process on your side of the pond, but over here, we have legislation stopped before pen hits paper simply because it's clear that the current leaders will never allow a vote on it.
That is a broken system, yes, but given the length of time people in those positions tend to serve (and I use that term lightly), it doesn't seem like the Queen's influence is much more. And at least her input doesn't suffer from being completely partisan.
To be abundantly clear: I don't think this is right, I just don't think it's very different than any other politician impeding democracy. Kings and Queens can and have been voted out, too.
>It is worrying that the Queen can just say no before legislation gets off the ground
The commonly-held belief in the UK is that the Queen gets to do this exactly one time before she is abolished completely, on the assumption that millions of people would riot if she used her power in such a direct fashion without a truly extreme reason (like a nuke blowing up Westminster or something).
Yep, and it's seen as a last bastion before a malevolent (even if elected) government invokes tyranny.
She'd have to be so sure that the populace would be behind her, and willing to risk the very existence of the monarchy. It'd take stopping a really "bad" thing for her to take that risk.
I think it’s different because the MPs are specifically elected by the public to propose (or block) legislation, and the hierarchy of Parliament is in turn determined by the votes of same elected officials. The Queen isn’t elected. By the same argument you could say that it’s fine for me to have a veto over British legislation, and I assure you that it would not be.
Royal powers went away in 1689. The Queen's role here is entirely pro forma, and she cannot alter legislation.
The fact that governments have sought her approval on matters, despite not being required to do so, isn't remotely surprising. And if you didn't care about the state providing a privileged life for the royals before, why would you care now?
The fact is, not enough people care enough to make it a political priority.
More to the point, virtually all royal powers can, by tradition which is as strong as fundamental law, if not as clear on how you might amend it, be used only on the advice of (which in practice means at the direction of) of various bodies of Government, mostly the Cabinet wearing different hats.
The Crown just provides a bit of formal distance from the acts for the actual actors (but, being as it's been true for so long, that probably doesn't mean much in terms of practical accountability.)
The prime minister goes to meet the queen once a week. Do people think they just talk about the weather, kiss the ring, and leave? Or the PM just says what laws they wish to pass while the queen silently listens?
Parliament is sovereign. Consequently, the Queen has exactly as much power as Parliment allows.
Sure, the Queen could decide to exercise her power outside of the constrained ways she currently does, but the very likely effect of that is a vote to strip her of her power.
This is always a fun start to any argument about the constitution of the UK.
The thing is, you're building on a foundation that could potentially be challenged. As we discovered during the Brexit debates, people are happy to use words like "parliamentary sovereignty" when it suits their purposes, yet clearly many of them have never actually read Dicey, much less understood its entire argument or what the resulting concept of parliamentary sovereignty really means. And of course Dicey himself was not empowered with any special authority, but rather assembled a rational argument based primarily on historical precedent, which has subsequently been broadly accepted by figures in authority in the UK but is still, like everything else about our constitution, more a matter of convention than clear popular mandate.
Perhaps more importantly, if Parliament really is constitutionally sovereign, in the sense that its rules are supreme over all others and nothing a current parliament does can ever bind a future parliament, then we can never improve our system of government by adopting a formal written constitution, even if doing so would have overwhelming public support at the time. If you're going to make any argument about improving the constitution, starting from a foundation that necessarily precludes the single most important improvement that could be made might not be the best idea.
For what it's worth, Canada somehow managed the trick. That is to say, through an act of the British Parliament, the Canadian legislature became a sovereign legislature, bound by a written constitution.
Basically, the UK Parliament passed a law delegating all of its powers to the Canadian legislature and declared it would never debate or pass a law again on the Canada question. Nothing actually stops them from doing so. But after 150 years of holding to this convention, it may as well be written in stone.
One can imagine the UK Parliament delegating its powers to successor entities and then essentially abolishing itself to a purely ceremonial function. Give it some time, and everyone gets used to it and that's the new system. Just ramp up devolution, basically.
For what it's worth, Parliamentary sovereignty is also an idea in the Canadian constitutional system, where it's taken to mean that the legislatures have absolute authority within their areas of jurisdiction, and that collectively the legislatures also have the authority to rewrite the constitution.
(As an aside, "What would happen if the British Parliament did repeal the British North America Act 1867 or Canada Act 1982?" is a rather fun hypothetical from the Canadian side.)
> (As an aside, "What would happen if the British Parliament did repeal the British North America Act 1867 or Canada Act 1982?" is a rather fun hypothetical from the Canadian side.)
The Queen would likely (rightly) refuse Royal Assent if parliament tried that, given that as she is also Queen of Canada, she could never legitimately allow the UK Parliament to do that.
And if so some reason she did not, it would have no real impact on Canada anyway. Practically speaking Canada is in no way bound by the UK at this point. While legal theory may claim otherwise, it does not really matter. Legal theory would also claim the US constitution is illegitimate, because it was not passed in the way considered correct by its predecessor document (Articles of Confederation). Nobody cares.
The UK trying to change Canada's constitutional situation would be no more effective than the US passed a law claiming to amend Canada's constitution. The Government of Canada would laugh at it, and otherwise move on with their day. In the UK case they might debate changing to no longer be a Monarchy, since their Queen had failed them here.
Yes. It's just a silly thought experiment, of course. I mentioned it, if anything, to highlight how, what the law says on paper, may not be the real law.
Canada would, of course, simply ignore any such act. Even if there were a strong legal argument made in our own courts that it somehow abolished our sovereignty, we'd all agree to simply pretend otherwise.
Right. The difficult thing is determining the difference between the written law, the actual law, and mere custom.
For example, the custom is that the Queen will appoint whoever she believes to be most likely to hold the confidence of parliament as the prime minister. Obviously the best candidate is usually the leader of the majority party or a collation that has a majority.
De Jure, however, she may appoint anyone (besides herself?) at any time for any reason. She would be stupid to do anything other than what is customary, but if she did, I am pretty certain the consensus would be that doing was was legal if unwise. After all, this has already happened in a form by way of the Governor General in Australia infamously dismissing the prime minister to enable Supply to be passed, and new elections held, which clearly violates the custom.
The selecting prime minister case is also interesting as it is one of the few where the custom is not based on the advice of Her Majesty's Government because of the obvious conflict of interest there.
On the other hand, while all Royal Prerogatives are de jure the Queen's, many of them arguably can only be exercised by the State/Government, which is clearly a distinct entity from the Queen, despite the laws constantly identifying the two as one and the same (the laws identify both the hereditary office of the Monarchy and the executive organ of the state as the Crown, despite those obviously being distinct things in reality). For example, If the Queen tried to seize control of the Armed Forces away from her Government/MoD, this might be deemed unlawful despite control of the the armed forces being a reserve power, and her being the nominal commander in chief.
One of the nice things about a good written constitution is that it helps to differentiate what is merely custom vs what is the actual law. Of course, the actual law and the written law can still differ, but it does help to avoid assuming what is merely a custom is the de jure law.
The legal situation might be somewhat different for other Commonwealth or former Commonwealth states anyway, because you don't necessarily have the same historical arguments about the supremacy of the UK parliament within those jurisdictions.
But yes, if we did want a new written constitution to become superior to any other legal authority except for a popular decision to change that constitution, one strategy that might be compatible with our current legal order would be to establish and empower whatever new order was intended and then render the historical Parliament functionally impotent so that no mechanism remained for it to pass any new legislation that would undermine the new order.
I wonder what Dicey would have made of such issues today. I suspect he might have argued that any claimed authority under any system of government is relevant only if that system has popular consent, so regardless of historical precedent, if the will of the people is clearly to change to a new system of government then the old system no longer enjoys any moral authority anyway.
As a practical matter, if the public view is clear and most of those in positions of power within the new order, such as political representatives and judges, support that view, then arguments about preserving the historical order become moot points anyway. And if the public ever felt strongly enough about our constitution that this kind of change was a realistic prospect, I wouldn't expect anyone in a position of power to keep that position under the new order if they didn't support it.
> And of course Dicey himself was not empowered with any special authority, but rather assembled a rational argument based primarily on historical precedent, which has subsequently been broadly accepted by figures in authority in the UK but is still, like everything else about our constitution, more a matter of convention than clear popular mandate.
Isn't that true of any such system? The US may have a written constitution, but that would be just a piece of paper if it weren't for the conventions surrounding it.
> Perhaps more importantly, if Parliament really is constitutionally sovereign, in the sense that its rules are supreme over all others and nothing a current parliament does can ever bind a future parliament, then we can never improve our system of government by adopting a formal written constitution, even if doing so would have overwhelming public support at the time. If you're going to make any argument about improving the constitution, starting from a foundation that necessarily precludes the single most important improvement that could be made might not be the best idea.
The statement is that Parliament is sovereign, not that Parliament necessarily ought to be sovereign. In practice I'm sure we could find a way to restrict the authority of parliament - the judiciary have already signalled some willingness to question the validity of laws if they undermine the integrity of parliament as a democratic body or basic human rights. But assuming we didn't, sure, we'd have to technically have a revolution, akin to the founding of the Fifth Republic in France. So what? Most countries have to redo their constitution every so often - it'd be very strange to expect a written constitution from hundreds of years ago to be appropriate for government today.
Isn't that true of any such system? The US may have a written constitution, but that would be just a piece of paper if it weren't for the conventions surrounding it.
Perhaps, but I think there is a profound difference in the legitimacy and authority of a system of government if there has at some point been a clear demonstration that the general public consent to it. The ideal might be a popular vote to accept the original constitution document, with a substantial majority in favour, and then some practical mechanism that allows any member of the public to cause a later change to the constitution if the consensus of their peers agrees with them. The important point is that the final authority on the system of government is the people being governed, directly.
In practice I'm sure we could find a way to restrict the authority of parliament - the judiciary have already signalled some willingness to question the validity of laws if they undermine the integrity of parliament as a democratic body or basic human rights.
According to our current constitution as generally accepted, the courts can't overrule the will of Parliament. That is parliamentary supremacy in action.
Human rights cases heard by our highest courts have typically come down to favouring an interpretation of statute law that is compatible with other statute law like the HRA in cases of ambiguity. It is understood that if Parliament clearly intends a new law to reduce the legal protection of human rights then our courts must follow that intent in their judgements.
After that, we're getting into some very fuzzy areas that come to the foreground with issues like Brexit or Scottish independence, but again the courts will enforce the will of Parliament (and by extension, the ability of Parliament to express its will).
I personally don't think either of those is necessarily a good thing, which is why I believe it could be better in the long term if we had a proper written constitution as many other states do, setting out the basic structure of our government and associated responsibilities, authorities and limits on power, with explicit popular consent to that form of government.
> The important point is that the final authority on the system of government is the people being governed, directly.
Well, the will of the people can't bind itself, so I'd say the current system reflects that pretty well.
> According to our current constitution as generally accepted, the courts can't overrule the will of Parliament. That is parliamentary supremacy in action.
Sure, but this is also, as you said, just a matter of convention and precedent. Jackson suggests the consensus has already shifted somewhat away from absolute parliamentary supremacy.
I'm reacting to the central conceit of the piece, that this process of royal consent is somehow undemocratic.
This is the system of government that the people of Britain have chosen, and the impact of the queen is exclusively a political problem. If there was a serious difference between the will of Parliament (Commons) and the Queen, the result is a foregone conclusion.
This is the system of government that the people of Britain have chosen
There is surprisingly little basis for arguing that the people of the UK have ever chosen almost anything important about our current system of government. That system is largely based on historical conventions, often dating back centuries and in some cases to the outcomes of civil war, and the status quo has several built-in feedback loops that make it difficult to change even with widespread popular support. The constitution of the UK is a fascinating subject, but it can also be rather uncomfortable subject matter to study if you believe in ideas like democracy and civil liberties.
Parliament is sovereign, including over the monarchy. She categorically cannot overrule any legislation without being granted the power to do so by parliament, who can revoke that power at will. There was a whole civil war and other crazy shit to figure it out, but the monarch hasn't had that kind of authority since the end of the 17th century.
The article is actually making a big deal about the fact that the queen expressed an opinion about legislation in an area that the author decided wasn't covered by the vague wording of a pamphlet.
For anyone interested in exploring this topic further, i recommend "the crown" series on netflix.
The series theme may come across as bland when compared gems like the wire & breaking bad... but the theme of duty, especially in these times, is uniquely powerful, and production values are worthy of any top series on tv.
For a nonUK viewer, it is hugely instructional. I enjoyed the show immensely
It is a great show that I agree on, but, as I pointed out in another comment is not totally accurate and some parts are likely to be just fiction (thinking in particular of certain conversations).
I think the only way to get a better picture is to read a lot of different books on the subject.
I was hoping the Queen's consent would be about things like foreign policy, going to war, etc. But it's just about laws that could possibly affect the Queen's income. That sounds just like garden variety corruption.
Well, the article says that we don't really know, it just references a pamphlet. My understanding (and take this for what you will) is that it's interpreted very liberally. So, foreign policy and war are likely taken into account.
It seems fair that the monarch would have some influence over laws that affect them (especially farther back in the past). It seems reasonable for the king to be able to veto an act of Parliament that unilaterally confiscates the king's lands and/or income. How far that the veto should extend is a matter of policy, but the veto itself is not a sign of corruption.
The Queen is also literally above the law and the military is sworn to her personally and not the government. Of course British history has shown the effectiveness of extralegal measures for dealing with bad monarchs so those powers are still limited.
The monarch isn’t above the law, it has been granted immunity from being sued but this is all entirely on the gift of parliament. Inside the robing room used just before she addresses the House of Lords is a copy of the death warrant for Charles I as a little reminder of who really is in charge.
The courts are literally the Queen’s. As for Charles I that was the result of losing a civil war and in case it’s not blindingly obvious exactly the kind of extralegal remedy I was referring to.
De jure but not de facto - It's the Crown Prosecution Service but it would be the stroke of a pen to change that, unless the Queen somehow mobilized the army any revolution would be swift and quiet.
How does one even become a monarch? They weren't always hereditary, and it would be interesting to see what they were based on. Seems like you need some kind of divine recognition, as otherwise you're just a dictator.
Not all monarchies are hereditary. The Holy See is, while technically theocratic and thus not a monarchy, an example of what elective monarchy would look like. Perhaps the weirdest example is Andorra, which makes Emmanuel Macron (the President of France) an elected, er, diarch (he's only Co-Prince) by the virtue of being elected by people who have no ties to the country.
To answer the question of how hereditary monarchies get started: in the modern era (post-Napoleonic Wars, generally), new monarchies carved out of existing states either elevated important local elites (the Sharif of Mecca's sons got kingdoms in Iraq and Transjordan out of WWI, with the Sharif himself proclaiming a kingdom in Hejaz), or they shopped around important royal families in Europe to import a monarch (e.g., a lot of German princes found themselves kings of newly-created Balkan states in the 19th century). The right of conquest to attain a royal title is pretty well-accepted, although conquest usually comes from someone who already has a heritable noble title anyways (cf. the Dukes of Normandy becoming Kings of England).
The older noble lineages in Europe (and elsewhere, but I really don't know much about the history of nobility outside of Europe) appear to largely arise from a Germanic system of elected chiefdoms where one family gradually gains enough power to force the elections to choose them, eventually (though not always, cf. the Holy Roman Empire) dispensing with the pretense of election. Given the paucity of written sources, we obviously have very little record of how these influential families actually came to gain their influence, and the sources that we do have tend to be edited to suggest divine providence as the originator of their rule.
Pretty fascinating history overall. In England's case, the earliest monarch we'd recognize as "King of England" was Alfred the Great, who was king of what was called Wessex at the time. Wessex was the last holdout of "native" English as opposed to being ruled by Vikings and their descendants. Wessex eventually re-conquered the island a few hundred years later and became England.
As to how earlier kings gained their position, at least in England I'd say it was some combination of local warlords that were semi-legitimized during Roman rule, then later their descendents consolidated power after the Romans left, either through marriage, trade, or violence.
> As to how earlier kings gained their position, at least in England I'd say it was some combination of local warlords that were semi-legitimized during Roman rule, then later their descendents consolidated power after the Romans left, either through marriage, trade, or violence.
That definitely didn't happen. The locals in Roman Britain would be the Bretons, a Celtic-speaking people. The withdrawal of Roman power from Britain was followed with the Anglo-Saxon migrations of people from what is now the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark, which (actually rather rapidly) displaced the Celtic speakers with Germanic speakers. The Anglo-Saxon petty kingdoms arose after the migration, although they were subsequently occupied by the Great Dane Army that settled in the Danelaw region of England. It was the Mercian (one of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms) failure to deal with the Vikings and Alfred the Great's success that led the Wessex king, and not the then-dominant Mercian king, to actually unify all of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms into a single Kingdom of England.
The origination of these Anglo-Saxon kingdoms is extremely unclear, happening during the Great Migration and in an area where the written record rather abruptly dies out. Virtually the entire list of sources for this period is Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the Peoples of Britain and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle commissioned by Alfred the Great.
The straightforward answer is that you are born the heir of someone who is already the monarch.
A better answer for the UK in line with your point about religious recognition is that you are anointed monarch. There is a coronation ceremony where the heir is anointed with holy oil (chrism) by the Archbishop of Canterbury. After that, they stop being an ordinary person and become monarch.
You can see part of the coronation of Elizabeth II (and hear the incredible Zadok the Priest coronation anthem by Handel) here [0], although not the anointing itself, because it happens under a canopy and has never been filmed.
Actually, not true. What you're referring to is known as primogeniture succession, but there were also elective monarchies and tanistry, and probably more that I don't know about. Sometimes succession was limited to the immediate family, sometimes a 'bloodline', sometimes any eligible nobles.
For example that article mentions the Kingdom of Italy was briefly had this as the succession law:
The Kingdom of Italy was designated a secundogeniture for the second surviving son of Napoleon I Bonaparte but, failing such, provided for the emperor's stepson, Eugène de Beauharnais, to succeed, even though the latter had no blood relationship to the House of Bonaparte
Actually, it is true but not exhaustive. Nor was it intended to be. I was addressing the context of monarchy in the UK, as the rest of the comment makes clear.
The GP was asking in general, so your straightforward answer is explicitly wrong and must be read in that context, whether the UK's one happen to evolve into one is a bit irrelevant. Then again, even in 'recent' history, William of Orange was invited to take the English crown without primogeniture.
> How does one even become a monarch? They weren't always hereditary, and it would be interesting to see what they were based on. Seems like you need some kind of divine recognition, as otherwise you're just a dictator.
IIRC, you conquer a territory, descend (biologically or legally) from someone who did, or politically maneuver to replace an existing monarch or heir (for instance, by assassinating them).
I think the difference between a king and a dictator is that a king is the top feudal lord and a dictator is the top guy in a nation state.
I think the options for becoming a monarch are:
1) the birth heir of a current hereditary monarch
2) the designated heir of the current monarch (e.g. some Roman emperors were appointed by their predecessor. Although the August didn't call himself "king" because of the historical political animosity to a king, he did intend for the position to be hereditary, but the first few emperors had trouble having sons. Whether the emperors were monarchs is arguably semantic, although Rome was more of an empire [extracting resources from the periphery] than a feudal state, which would argue that they are not monarchs by my definition above. On the other hand, Roman administration of provinces wasn't as strong as a nation-state.)
4) conqueror somewhere and establish a feudal state. It might be necessary for you to have a successful succession in order for history to call you king, though.
>Seems like you need some kind of divine recognition, as otherwise you're just a dictator.
I'd argue you have it backwards there. You start as a dictator (you and a bunch of people who agree with you take over some part of land, congrats you're the King) then the legitimacy comes from you and your family holding on to it till everyone's used to it.
It's kind of strange. 20 years ago there was the House of Commons making laws, with the House of Lords checking the laws, and the Queen who signed the votes.
Now, the House of Commons has made the House of Lords something that can be ignored, and now they also want to do away with the Queen.
I think it is dangerous to see the House of Commons gaining more and more power over the country, without any regulatory body being able to hold them in line.
Basically, the person who leads the party that wins the general elections the moment the Queen's powers are stripped, is the person who creates, validates, appoints and signs the laws of the country. Is that the power you want to give to one single party? What if that body decides to stop holding elections?
A Head of State that holds office for more than one or two periods of a House isn't such a bad idea. Continuity is also important, especially considering the whims of (less than) half the general population every fout years.
> It's kind of strange. 20 years ago there was the House of Commons making laws, with the House of Lords checking the laws, and the Queen who signed the votes.
> Now, the House of Commons has made the House of Lords something that can be ignored,
The House of Commons gained the right to override the House of Lords through the Parliament Acts of 1911 and 1949. A lot longer than 20 years ago.
It's worth noting that the House of Commons recently refused to debate a law for an equivalent to the perjury laws during parliamentary debate. i.e. is fine to lie in the House of Commons.
Recently Johnson overruled the House of Lords appointment commission to give someone a peerage that was involved in a corruption scandal[1].
That along with the the lies used to the win the Brexit referendum have robbed me of any faith in our current system of first past the post government so I see the need for more checks and balances.
Unfortunately, the current system seems open to abuse such as Charles using this royal privilege to keep people from owning homes on his enormous estate lands.
That's how it works in almost every modern democratic country. The check and balance to the power of the current government is the constitution, with a national constitutional court enforcing it.
I think quite a few of those also have multi party proportional representation which tend to avoid parliamentary majorities, so checks and balances are their in a different (I would argue better) form.
That's a fair point, but I don't think the house of lords really represents a second chamber? Usually that second chamber consists of representatives of federate states, such as the senate or the Bundesrat.
And what happens if that head of state decides to overrule the Parliament on a whim? Is it even meaningful to talk about an entire population having "whims", as that's a term normally reserved for individuals.
People can afford to take edgy contrarian positions on the basics of democracy because they take it for granted. The Queen is not an abusive monarch and never has been, in fact she's been so scrupulously symbolic that her actual political views are almost entirely obscure. So here we see arguments of the form "maybe Parliament should have to bend to the whims of the Queen".
The Queen is 94. How many more years can she carry on? When she dies, Prince Charles will take her place and he has always been politically active in ways the Queen has not. Does the idea of Charles vetoing legislation sound fun or in any way appropriate for a first world democracy? No, it does not.
I don't like the Guardian at all but it's good that they're bringing this to light, or rather, it would, if they were actually revealing the documents in question. It seems this article isn't going to do so, which means we are being asked to trust the Graun. Unfortunately I don't trust the Graun so this is a bit of a pickle. What's being said here sounds plausible, and there's really no reason for such a process to exist at all, but it could also be shit-stirring.
The discussion on the value of monarchy is hotly debated around a quantitative measure of value, tourism vs maintenance costs.
I do think there is a case to be made on the qualitative aspect of value.
A monarch acts as a check for ambitious undesirables (politicians/hollywood types etc) from achieving the ideal elite rank in society, as no one can truly be king by definition, except the king. As such, they act as "power inhibitors" on the rest of elite society.
Inhibiting cult of personality, the monarch instead reflect opposite values like devotion to duty, and restraint, instilled from birth.
In summary, this seems like catastrophic insurance. Even if the probability is very low, the price to insure against a despot , would seem to be reasonable.
I wonder if private members' bills are subject to the same consent. As far as I'm aware, the first time the chamber hears of these bills is when they are submitted by the member, and presumably by that stage it's public and can't be retracted without bringing a huge spotlight on this obscure rule. A private member's bill could therefore potentially be used to bring about the abolition of this practice.
If Wikipedia is to be believed, it already has been used to prevent a Private Member's Bill from being debated relatively recently in 1999: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_parliamentary_approval_for_... Also, I don't think this rule is really any more obscure than any of the other subtle details of the UK's unwritten constitution - people who care about this sort of thing almost certainly already knew about it (I certainly did!) The Guardian is probably trying to turn it into a big scandal because they don't really like the fact that we have a monarchy.
As a Canadian I was curious if I could find a reference to a similar process in our procedures, and indeed we are also subject to Royal Consent. Interesting!
The royals everywhere are clinging to their titles inherited and stolen from their mass murderer ancestors.All this based on a ridiculous(pretend or not, end justifies the means) right to rule religious doctrine.
And the politicians do not pass legislature to end this travesty because it might not be popular. The days of such power structures and its cronies should be numbered, it is not sustainable and we have better alternatives.
Prince Andrew is funded by taxpayer money. Think about that.
The Queen of England is also the head of the Australian Government, and has the power to fire the Prime Minister of Australia. She actually did so in 1975.
> The Queen of England is also the head of the Australian Government,
No, she's not, the Prime Minister is head of government. The monarch is generally held to be the head of state, though that's not entirely clear and the Governor-General is sometimes referred to that way.
> She actually did so in 1975.
The Crown by the action of the Governor-General did, there's no indication that the Queen had any direct involvement.
Well, I mean, it's possible that the detailed information that has come out about the GG trying to get assurances that, if the PM advices that he be removed to forestall a dismissal, the monarch would disregard that advice and receiving a communique from the Queen’s private secretary that, in that event, she would be obliged to follow the PM’s advice has managed to miss another layer of secret communication directly with the monarch directing the action, with the other private communication being a cover. But, I mean, secret backchannels and influences are always possible whatever the former arrangement of power is: the conspiracy theory that the dismissal was directed by the Queen has far less support compared to the theory that it was directed by the CIA, which has no formal role in Australia’s government.
Oh, no doubt the Whitlam affair was directed by the CIA, but the idea that the Crown and the CIA are not in league is also pretty far-fetched. The UK is a significant lackey to a lot of the crime the CIA and other TLA's have been committing around the world, lately. The 5-eyes wars wouldn't be prosecuted with nearly as much enthusiasm if it weren't for the support provided by the crown, for the sake of British Petroleum ..
If you’re looking for an intelligent argument that justifies the British aristocracy, I recommend reading T. S. Eliot. Although American by birth, he spent most of his life in England. His book Notes Toward the Definition of Culture is a good read.
This comes at an incredibly unfortunate time and has the potential to lead to a monarchy crisis in the UK.
The royals haven't won too many favours with the public over the past few years. Prince Andrew's involvement with Epstein, Charles breaking lockdown rules, and now this.
As an outsider, i wonder what makes people accept the Queen's position in a democracy. Someone said its because in England everybody is related by blood, so the sentiment of a blood line is what makes people accept the Royal Family. How true is this ?
How are rich families still having a significantly larger influence over our societies in the 21st Century? This is inexcusable. It's like we traded lords and nobles for politicians bought and sold by lords and nobles.
We have a weird relationship with our royals, similarly with our House of Lords. Lots of people seem to want rid of them, and many have half-good reasons on a theoretical level, but nobody really has any solutions to the problems they solve.
To take a recent example from a country that shall remain nameless, how do you stop a magalomaniac from duping half the population with a mix of nationalist rhetoric and promises of rolling back any half-uncomfortable environmental or sociological progress? If the whole government gets tainted at the same time, even if the country realises its mistake half a decade later, the money wasted in switching the laws back - the economic equality and environmental progress lost, the damage to international relations... all because the person in charge doesn't actually care about the country, and there is no ironclad process for getting them out of power (besides the collective power of a government that is either scared of his voter influence, or realises their power is contingent on his)
None of the laws this article claims the Queen has "influenced" worry me in the slightest. It doesn't benefit anyone to know how much wealth she has (in fact, if something should happen and her wealth fluctuates drastically, that could cause more damage to public and international perception than good) and the law has always maintained, as far as I'm aware, that many driving laws do not apply on private property - Sandringham et al being considered private property for the purposes of this law makes logical sense to me. The national monuments one is just bizarre, smacks of a power-grab by government - albeit a petty one. I suspect it was a way of getting more tourist revenue. But either way, its not exactly earth shattering.
"But what if Prince William becomes king and uses these powers for evil purposes?" I hear you cry. Well, in that case something will change. Either an uprising will happen or evil will be done. Though as long the monarchy's well-being for their whole life is entwined with the country's well-being, there is less likelihood that a sane king or queen would rock the boat significantly.
I seriously doubt that this is the law that will cause the next major catastrophe. As that certain other country has proven, unbridled democracy is a more potent threat.
Many will talk of title to a crown. What right had Caesar to the empire? Might first made kings, and laws were then most sure When like the Draco's they were writ in blood
Why is The Guardian up in arms about this, but not about the very clear and well understood veto that President Biden has over every single law that goes through Congress? Yes, The Guardian is a UK/commonwealth publication, but the article is essentially making the point "this shouldn't happen in a democracy", and yet the world's arguably largest and most influential democracy has an even greater veto power for their head of state.
So where's Glenn Greenwald's complaints that the Guardian's journalists are prying into the Queen's private conversations and that she should be allowed to have these without criticism?
You’re suggesting that a head of state (more, a sovereign) should have the right to rule subjects by decree in private. I think that most would agree that the citizens should have the right to know how the laws they live under came to be. You are unfair to conflate Greenwald's advocacy for everyday individual privacy with the Queen’s right to rule arbitrarily.
Parliament does have power over the monarch in some senses, of course, in that there is precedent for Parliament changing the order of succession or introducing a regency. This happened without the monarch's assent, though admittedly over a hundred years ago. But the British constitution is one that replies on precedence, not a formal document.
I've characterized the Queen's powers as "reserve powers" inasmuch as, if everything goes wrong and Parliament dies from a meteor strike, the government still legally operate provided there is a monarch (even if you have to reach deep into the line of succession to find that person). By law she has to call elections within a certain amount of time. Obviously there's nothing to force her to follow the laws, but that's true of any country. She (or her heirs) are the leaders of last resort.