Tomorrow morning the Queen will be requested by her Prime Minister to announce a legislative programme that both she and he know he will not deliver. He has not got the means to do so in the current parliament. There is an election coming which means that this session of parliament might only last days. And he may not get re-elected. To say that the Queen must feel like she is being used must be one of the biggest understatements of the year.
So what should she do? If she had any sense she'd ignore the vellum that will be presented to her and will, instead, give her own speech.
She should say she's quitting.
She should say that's because the relationship of trust between her and her prime ministers that has been a cornerstone of the monarchy and her own reign has failed.
And she should say that she does not just quit. She should add that she makes clear that her family no longer want a constitutional role in the UK: that they collectively recognise that the era when anything of the sort was passed by right of birth is over.
And so she should say that it is her wish that rather than spend its time considering a legislative programme that will never come to pass she does instead ask parliament to consider how it might amend the unwritten constitution of the UK so that her role within it, and that of the Lords she supposedly appoints, might be reconsidered.
She might add, whilst she's at it, that she wants an end to the so-called Royal prerogative that she has never been allowed to exercise.
And that she'd really like to stop being used as the excuse for all starts of abuse.
So, without saying it, she might say to our political, class 'get your own act together and stop blaming everyone else for your failings, including me'.
Will she do this? Of course not. That's contrary to all she's ever been trained to do. But deep down you must think she'd really like to do just this. And that she also knows it is the best thing she might ever do. It would seal her legacy in a way nothing else could.
I live in hope. But on this occasion, that hope is very, very small indeed.
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Not a very nice feeling knowing you’re being made to be someone else’s lackey and patsy even for an ordinary citizen let alone a Royal. Even worse being publicly perceived as one. The Agreed the Queen, if wise, should tell Johnson to take a hike!
Haha … if only. Whatever it is you’re on, I want some!
In C4’s Gary Gibbon interview: ‘What does history tell us about Brexit?’ Charles Moore offers an interesting interpretation of the relationship between the sovereign, parliament and the people – https://www.channel4.com/news/what-does-history-tell-us-about-brexit. Worth a watch IMO.
I think that we need to understand that Mrs Windsor will of course says yes to anything.
This is because as she does consent, her and her family’s immunity to what ever foul laws and policies are passed or result in is guaranteed. Liz’s consent is purchased by ensuring that only her subjects suffer and not her or her kin. Life for them goes on untouched, certain to keep them in the life to which they have become accustomed.
I pointed this out to her in a recent letter.
Once we understand the arrangement as it is in those terms, I suggest we can then see that our democracy is indeed a sham. We use the name of our sovereign to validate the insanity of minority extreme vested interests of the few and the cruelty of the indifferent.
It is therefore not about Queenie resigning (would you if you and yours were kept in such luxury?) – it’s about how we can mobilise democracy to get rid of her and her cling-ons. It has to happen – hers is the keystone that once removed, then the whole bloody edifice will start to crumble because the venal swine who tend to run our country will lose their veneer of respectability and have nothing else to hide behind.
I have said in the past that perhaps we may have to come out of Europe to realise its value to us. I still think that that might be true. But now I am genuinely scared – I mean REALLY scared at the prospect.
Her resignation would fullfil the forecast in a song by the late Morris Blythman which said:
Chairlie the First, he was beheided
Chairlie the Second, he succeeded
Chairlie the Third will no be needed
Lucky wee Prince Chairlie
An hereditary monarchy is a useless feudal relic and should be abolished and a republic declared. In the interim I think Charles would be quite good at challenging the ineptitude of ministers and finding a way out of this absurd constitutional impasse as his letters to them on other subjects show.
Progressive Pulse ran this on October 5th.
http://www.progressivepulse.org/society/misusing-the-monarch
I felt like commenting to say “not only clearly misusing the Monarch, but frankly ” ABusing” her, by making her perform a meaningless ceremony, like some circus act to entertain the tourists.
She would seal her legacy forever, were she to act as you suggest, Richard.
Alas, I fear “pigs might fly” has a greater probability. I’d put this close to the quantum probability that every particle in the universe would simultaneously transition from existence to nonexistence, so that the whole cosmos ceased to exist!
đ
And replace her with what? Luckily the queen is head of state in at least a dozen other countries. Jamaica iirc will wait till she passes on before holding a vote on whether to replace the institution. If repeated in a few other territories, when the U.K. chooses a new institution to replace there will be some models to avoid and some that work that are already extant.
There’s no need to rush in telling a dying woman she should quit her job mainly because you want us to be a Brussels rule maker. Imagine someone telling you to quit your job as head of at least two major international organisations because of the ineffectiveness of the institutions and because at this particular moment in time it’s a charade.
We still have to get through the charade to get to the serious stuff. The route to get there more directly has been blocked by our current set of elected representatives
This has nothing to do with Brussels whatsoever
It has a lot to do with her being abused by Johnson and his predecessors
I beg to differ on the concept ‘abuse’ here.
In typical cases of abuse, the abused gains nothing whatsoever from the experience.
You cannot say that of Elizabeth II. She’ll sign anything and gets rewarded each time as her ‘subjects’ are thrown to the wolves and she and her brood get mollycoddled.
It’s just not on. The system is designed to use her and she uses it. It’s mutually beneficial between her and what ever passes (or fails) for a Government at the time.
Jenner has a rather cutting cartoon in the Guardian today, it may even be described as quite apt!
(Sorry. I have no idea how to reproduce it here, or even give a link to it.)
I hope this helps Willie John đ
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2019/oct/13/ben-jennings-on-the-tories-approach-to-the-queens-speech-cartoon
Copy the link shown in the box above the article, picture etc and then paste it into your comment box. That is how it’s supposed to work but I find sometimes it doesn’t!
Given the widespread public affection for the Queen (though not perhaps for the royal family), I’ve been a bit surprised that the PM’s advising her to commit an act that was judged unlawful by the highest court in the land has not provoked a significant public reaction. Obliging her to announce a programme of legislation today that has no chance of being enacted in this session of parliament is a further serious abuse of the established contitutional role of the head of state.
It should not beyond the bounds of constitutional propiety for the Queen to ask the PM some simple questions. For example: “Mr. Johnson, do you command a majority in the House of Commons to ensure the enactment of this proposed legislation? How long do you expect this session to last?”
The Queen would be perfectly justified in communicating the PM’s responses, if any, to these questions in some preliminary remarks when she makes her speech.
As I understand it this is a BIG LIE. The Queen has no authority to either accept or reject anything that the Prime Minister proposes. It is is just a charade to persuade the public that the Queen has some power. She is just an actor in a play.
Breaking News! Queen resigns. Says she feels she’s just a pawn in the Great Game between King Boris, “The People” and the EU.
Expecting the Queen to speak for herself on behalf of the nation, rather than the Government, is analogous to expecting the dummy to take over and speak for the ventriloquist. As a constitutional monarch, the Queen has no voice of her own, her words can only come from her ministers. She cannot act arbitrarily but is bound by the concrete content of the advice that she receives from her Government. She is, if not quite literally, a dummy, a puppet controlled by constitutional form. When she agreed to the prorogation of parliament, the Queen performed her role as a constitutional monarch to a âtâ. When she gave the Queenâs Speech today, she again performed her duty as the UKâs constitutional monarch. All that is required of such a monarch is the ability to say yes and to dot the âiâ, Hegel wrote in The Philosophy of Right. The sovereign is the performative moment of decision or duty, it is not the substance behind either of these. In giving the Queenâs Speech, the sovereign performs a monotonous rite; all the Ruritanian pomp surrounding this event underlines its pure formality. On legislative Acts, the Queen merely signs her name, but the importance of this name is that it is the ultimate instance, the last word beyond which it is impossible to go.
The agreement of the Queen, be it in appointing a Government, enacting legislation or giving the Queenâs Speech, is purely formal; the constitution provides the framework for her performance, while the content is provided by her Prime Minister. Whatever opinions the Queen might have as a private person are irrelevant to the case; however wise she might be has no bearing on the decision she has to make or the duty she has to perform; whatever fascination the Queen and her family may have for us is merely our misunderstanding of the role of the constitutional monarch. She is a functional moment in a constitutional process. Her speech is the speech of a voice that comes from elsewhere, alive only when ventriloquised. Such a monarch âis effectively an idiotâ, Slavoj à ½ià žek has written. Our Queen, like all constitutional monarchs, is just âthe imbecilic tautology of an empty nameâ, while her person is the inconvenient and excessive residue of this name. If the Queenâs particularity, what she is as a person, is allowed to play a role in any decision then, wrote Hegel, âthe state is either not yet fully developed, or it is poorly constructedâ; or the UK constitution has now become so dysfunctional that it is in danger of imminent collapse.
What constitution? As I understand it all the English parliament has got is ‘precedents’, which surely just means ‘that’s the way we’ve always done it’!
The constitution that is contained in, inter alia, the Act of Settlement 1701, which legally established the independence of the judiciary, the Act of Union 1707, incorporating Scotland into the UK, the Parliament Act 1911, which abolished the veto power of the House of Lords and reduced parliamentary terms from seven to five years, the Government of Ireland Act 1920, the Parliament Act 1949, the European Communities Act 1972, which gave EU law precedence over UK domestic law. Then there are the Acts establishing the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly, as well as the Fixed Term Parliaments Act 2011, which restricted the ability of the Prime Minister to call a general election.