Isn't Britain a Constitutional *Monarchy*?
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.
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.
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.
https://inews.co.uk/news/long-reads/aristocrat-uk-britain-fa...
> Separate research last year confirmed that just under a third of all land in England and Wales is owned by members of the aristocracy
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.)