Ultimately, as we see in the USA just now, it’s impossible to reliably predict what will happen once one of the major power centers begins violating all the historical norms.
If the King started trying to rule by royal decree, darn near anything might happen. If the parliament started passing radical Fascist bills, darn near anything might happen. If the PM ordered HM Treasury to empty its coffers into his Swiss account, darn near anything might happen.
All the learned expositions upthread are superb guides to the mild push and shove of ordinary politics. They are not, and cannot be, a reliable guide to political Calvinball.
IMO this is applicable to all countries. The details differ from place to place and era to era, but the dilemma is the same. Governments bend until suddenly they break. What happens post-break is not predictable based on pre-break norms, no matter what those norms were.
I think the proper process for a truly unjust bill would be to pass it, but then have the courts give it an exceedingly narrow interpretation. An example for this (though not as extreme as yours) are the “ouster clauses” which Parliament has, at times, inserted into Acts. These clauses essentially say that if a government department adopts a particular decision, these decisions are final and cannot be contested before any court. Judges have, for obvious reasons, always disliked such clauses, but under the principle of sovereignty of Parliament they couldn’t strike them down. The result was, in the Anismininic case of 1968, the House of Lords paying lip service to the wording of the statute but then proceeding to hold that the clause can only apply to lawful decisions because an unlawful one would be null and void, and hence not a decision at all which could possibly be protected by the ouster clause. Which is, of course, not what Parliament had intended, but it was a way for the House of Lords to undermine a statute that they found evidently unjust but couldn’t annul openly.
The King cannot rule by decree. Such actions are null and void as of the Bill of Rights (1789), which declares among other things:
That the pretended power of suspending the laws or the execution of laws by regal authority without consent of Parliament is illegal;
That the pretended power of dispensing with laws or the execution of laws by regal authority, as it hath been assumed and exercised of late, is illegal;
Idiot trump can’t (legally) rule by decree. But if the rest of government goes along, here we are. He’s ruling largely by decree.
And what happens next is not defined by peices of paper, but by the deeds of people. Who may themselves be acting outside the scope of normal laws.
Is there much likelihood of HM King Charles III trying to go off the rails? No, of course not. But if some Monarch did some day, it’ll be deeds, not laws, that stop them.
If Charles really had his mind set on trying to rule by decree, then I think his best bet would be orders in council. In areas that are subject to the royal prerogative, all he’d need to adopt such an order would be a meeting of three privy councillors (of which there are hundreds, and to which he could appoint new ones) advising him to make the order, which he’d approve. In modern practice, orders in council are used to rubber stamp decisions already agreed between the government departments, but formally they are adopted by the King acting in a meeting of the Privy Council. They do, however, not have the force of an Act of Parliament, and can be struck down by the courts.
No, the end result would be that the monarch would be, at the very least, stripped of the power to withhold assent, and possibly removed from the throne entirely. But you are correct that the law in question would not come into effect until Parliament put some workaround or other in place, which likely wouldn’t be very long.
Somehow I feel that if they did remove him from the line of succession, would not faze Harry in the slightest. He may even welcome it.
Thing is, the only other time post-Charles I that there was an issue of stripping part of another government branch’s power wasthe Parliamentary Act of 1911 which had the full support of George V who was willing to use his Royal Prerogative to make enough peers to ensure it passed. Could Parliament, without a civil war, remove a monarch or their prerogatives without the monarch’s consent?
My understanding is that Parliament couldn’t legally remove the King’s prerogatives without the King’s consent. If they decided to do it anyway, however, I very much doubt that the outcome would be “civil war”.
I assume Parliament would just pass a law saying they don’t need the King’s assent anymore, and that nobody would care nearly enough to take up arms over it. It would technically be a revolution, but a very boring one.
Which needs RA to take effect.
And I’d have a real problem when one branch of government unilaterally seizes power from another or refuses to play within the system. As alluded to above, when the House of Commons looked to take power away from the House of Lords, it was going to be done completely within the rules at the time.
Well, OK, maybe you’d be out in the streets fighting for the Royalist cause, but I think you’d be outnumbered.
Trump ignoring court orders against him is a real example of a unilateral power seizure that everyone should have a real problem with, because it violates core principles of a democratic society.
I don’t think anyone today believes that Royal Assent is a core principle of democratic society. It’s a relic of bygone times whose continued existence is tolerated as long as it doesn’t cause any problems.
I think Americans view it as one last way to stop a horrible law from coming into effect, especially as the monarch is apolitical and can evaluate it as such. It may be the ultimate protecion for the common man from the evil politicians running the Commons. Imagine if QE2 had not given Royal Assent to Brexit? Life would be glorious in the UK right now.
I think Britishers view it as something that doesn’t need to be fixed until it gets in the way.
Yeah though most Trump’s seizure of power have been closer to the monarchs right to give assent. There wasn’t a explicitly written law saying he couldn’t do something, it was just convention that presidents didn’t do that (and the assumption was that if they did it would cause a big enough fuss to stop them getting away with it, even if there was no explicit repercussions specified for doing it). He just did it anyway and the fuss it caused didn’t amount to a hill of beans.
Not that I think the monarch is going to use his powers to seize power as an autocrat. But one of the main lessons of Trump is explicit well defined written constraints, with explicit repercussions for breaking them, are better than conventions which rely on good actors who care about the system.
Or alternatively, Parliament declares someone else to be King, has that person grant royal assent, and then when the whole thing is over passes - just to be on the safe side - a retroactive law legalising this whole transfer of the Crown. With royal assent by the new King, of course.