Updating Gov.uk’s crown

The last bill that was refused assent was the Scottish Militia Bill during Queen Anne's reign in 1708.

In Australia, my country, presenting law for Royal Assent is a rubber stamp, a symbolic act that transcends the current elected government houses.

Should "Royal Assent" be refused by the Crowns agent in Australia you'd see the country exit, the Crown is there for show, not to get involved or to meddle with the work of the elected Government.

I suspect Canada, New Zealand, et al are similar.

You could always point to an instance in which the Crown refused Royal Assent if you'd care to.

Only in catholic countries. I haven't looked up the numbers, but I assume less than half of remaining monarchies are catholic. Mostly because we have a number of protestant monarchies (like the Netherlands and Denmark), and we have plenty of monarchies that aren't Christian at all (like Thailand or Malaysia or Saudi Arabia).

You could obviously make the case that the monarch has unfair influence, but at the end of the day they still don’t have absolute power in any real sense.

Protestors were arrested for holding “Not my king” signs, so they later adopted blank signs as a symbol of free speech.

I think the football fans you’re referring to were supporters of Shamrock Rovers, a team from South Dublin.

The Republic of Ireland is a separate country, with no monarchy and no ties to the British monarchy since the formation of the Irish Free State in the early 1920’s.

There were however reports of Dundee United fans singing the same chant. Dundee is in Scotland which does share the Monarch, so that would support your point better.

Brenda may have had some influence over laws, but nothing compared to the influence normal political lobbyists and donors of the governments party have.

He was not personally doing this. The decision to arrest protesters comes down to the police present at the time, and I believe there was no arrest in the case to which you are referring. Specifically a single person holding a blank sign outside of parliament who was approached and questioned by a police officer but not arrested. I believe there where also subsequent protests involving blank signs, but no arrests for those either.

It always shocks me how readily people from other countries take a republican position in matters which really do not concern them. The right to protest in the UK has been degraded as a direct result of our elected government, rather than because of some nebulous power held by the king.

I'm not sure that assumption is particularly valid.

The only response I've ever had from them on the issue was "our contract with google says it gets anonymised". This puts a lot of trust in Google not to use all the tasty data that is being sent, and they made no claims that the data remains in-country or under their control.

There are simply thousands of Pillar Boxes across the United Kingdom and the best way to date them is to look at their cypher. This will identify the Monarch that was on the throne during their creation. When the monarch changes, new pillar boxes do not replace old but are added to those in use, and this is why Britain has such an array of boxes.

You will find, however, that in Scotland pillar boxes do not have ‘EIIR’ on them. This is because some Scottish people did not accept Queen Elizabeth as the second monarch of her name, since Queen Elizabeth I was never ruler of Scotland. Earlier pillar boxes with the cypher were vandalised and even blown up, and because of this they instead depict the Scottish Crown.

Extrapolating from your argument, do you think all traditions aught to stop when the economy takes a downturn? It's not as if having a monarchy, or maintaining any of the other traditions, comes at the cost of people being driven to poverty. We have the resources as a society to both provide a decent standard of living for people and to maintain our culture and traditions. It's ridiculous to think that cutting costs on the latter will do any good for the former; it will just free up money to be mismanaged elsewhere, or go on tax cuts for the rich. Your argument here isn't based on actually solving any real problem, just that you don't like the vibes of the situation.

I'll assume, given your high tax bracket, that you also have a high income. If so, it's pretty presumptuous for you to speak on behalf of poor people, who generally seem to quite like the monarchy in my experience. Being so starkly pro-austerity that you won't let them spend a little money on changing a few logos seems exceedingly out of touch, given the decade+ of austerity and cost-cutting that lead us to the current situation.

Everywhere else, I'm sure that may be the case. Except Norway. And Thailand. Maybe Bhutan. etc.

Australia barely accepted keeping the former Queen as head of state the last time this went to a referendum, and that was a member of the Royal family who served in WWII driving ambulances in London and stayed a steady constant since.

It's questionable whether there'd be any love for King (formerly known as Prince) Big Ears should it come to a vote again.

The part that is strongly liked is the notion of something constant and greater than day to day government, a sense of continuity of country.

Day to day meddling in details is strictly for the people we elect and hire to debate policy and pass that on to others that enact it.

The monarchy is an silly institution, but there’s something nice about having a (mostly) apolitical symbolic head of state. People look at it and think instead of Liz and Charles, we could have had someone like Trump, Macron, or President Boris, and that scares them off republicanism.

Germany is perhaps a bit better with their elected but mostly irrelevant president, but nobody even knows who they are, and in the end the prime minister acts like the head of state.

The most absurd thing about the monarchy is that it does its job quite well.

I think you are very wrong about that. The Danish royal family remains the head of state because no one want any of our politicians to become president. If feels like a nice safety net to have the king above the prime minister, not an effective one, but still. Politicians are short term, think short term and fickle minded, at least the royal family thinks generations ahead.

As long as the royal family is well behaved, polite and appear interested in the people, I think most countries will prefer to keep them as the official, but neutered figure heads.

That only holds water if this project means that they're never going to work on the never-used or soon-to-be-scrapped project that they'd otherwise be working on if the cypher never needed to be updated.

Ultimately, of course, this project is a tiny rounding error in the government's budget, so it doesn't really matter either way.

Since corporations seek to maximise profit over anything typically considered solely for the benefit of aesthetics: I guess a precedent exists that the cost can be worthy.

1 logo change on average 3 times every 100 years isn't that much, especially if you compare to basically any corporation outside of Mitsubishi in that time.

Chain-of-command portraits serve a practical, if minor, function; yes, more of them change when a chief executive changes than anyone else, but they also change when a batallion commander or civilian agency director changes, for the same reason as for a chief executive.

Heraldry of the monarch also serve a function, I suppose, but it is less like a chain of command photograph and more like the US national coat of arms (or the Great Seal, which has the former on the obverse); neither of which has changed substantially (there have been some rendering tweaks) since adopted by the Congress under the Articles of Confederation in 1782.

Bonus: you also get confused foreigners who think "6/12/20" is 6 Dec 2020 or even 12 June 2020, instead of 20 Dec 2024 (Reiwa 6). Fortunately the Japanese themselves are ISO-compliant and always use YYMMDD.

When you see the branding story for, say, Google or Pepsi, that looks like money flushed straight down the toilet.

Not entirely sure what he is meant to do.

I am a committed republican but as far as Kings in a constitutional monarchy can go he’s been pretty demonstrative against government policy.

And reflecting that cypher in the gov.uk branding was not Charles's choice.

And in basic training or the initial parts of officer training, one of the things people can be inspected on is having the names of everyone on that chain memorized. Not because that's something most military people routinely do, just to drive the point home of lawful orders and civilian control.