So.
To sum up the thread…
The Queen of the United Kingdom is constitutionally (SP?) empowered to punch you in the pants.
My. my, my.
The Things We Learn On This Board. 
Isn’t the Monarch of the UK also the head of the defence force? Then couldn’t he/she declare martial law and take back the power they’re ancestors lost?
PerfectDark
No. The Queen could declare what he likes, but do you really think the armed forces would just go along with her? Parliament would engage in some rapid legislative smackdown, and the Queen would be on her knees before you could say “no more Civil List cash”.
One of the major reasons why the Queen’s predecessors lost most of their powers in the first place was that they needed Parliaments to pay the wages of their armed forces. The same consideration is likely to discourage the armed forces from joining any royal-inspired coup d’etat in the future.
In fact, King John had the Magna Carta forced on him in 1215 CE for that very reason. The power of the monarch in England and it’s modern inheritors (including Great Britain) has been constrained constitutionally ever since.
Are you sure this is correct? My understanding is that the Acts of Union of 1707 created the “Kingdom of Great Britain” and that the “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland” was not created until the Acts of Union of 1800.
In assorted historical dramas (Barry Lyndon comes to mind) they will fly different versions of the Union Jack depending on the period. The flag in that movie set in the 1700’s was as I recall red and white, without the blue triangles that indicated the St. Patrick (Irish) component.
This is a zombie thread, but I’ll quickly answer this: The blue triangles have been there since tge Union between England and Scotland in 1707. In 1801, the diagonal red stripes within the white stripes were added to represent Ireland.
Ah. I had it backward.
The Union flag is a combination of the St George’s Cross (England), St Andrew’s Cross (Scotland) and St Patrick’s Cross. The English and Scottish flags are often used separately, according to circumstances (e.g., sports fixtures between the two countries, the CofE flies the St George’s from its churches, the St Andrew’s is everywhere in Scotland, but the St George’s has also in the past seemed too readily adopted by the wrong sort of nationalism). I don’t know if or how the St Patrick’s is used in either bit of Ireland (flags can be a really contentious issue there).
Also, the Union flag doesn’t contain any reference to Wales for a variety of historical and political reasons; there have been proposals to incorporate elements of the flag of St David (a gold cross on a black field) or the Welsh national flag (a red dragon on a white and green field). I think both of the proposed designs are pretty strong, but they got smacked down.
I think Britain has fought too many wars, and too many people have died, under the old flag for them to change it now. Wales was annexed and incorporated into England centuries before the Union with Scotland (this is also why, unlike Scotland, it’s not a separate legal system but rather part of the same jurisdiction as England); and in the British mind, the logic of “It’s always been like this” carries a lot of weight.
There’s also the question of other former kingdoms - if Wales gets representation on the UJ, why not Cornwall?
The Union Flag is one of the truly great flag designs. Not many countries have such clear and memorable designs. Messing with it would be a travesty.
There more than a few who would like it removed from our own flag, but that is a different problem. I personally quite like it. Although our flag is a bit of a hodgepodge and easily confused with others. Efforts to change it has similarly come to naught.
This is what I vaguely recalled… I had it backward. From Barry Lyndon
Note:
Penaia Kanatabatu Ganilau , the Governer General of Fiji, refused to recognize the military coup led by Lieutenant Colonel Sitiveni Rabuka, tried to restore parliamentary democracy, and eventually resigned.
The Queen had no direct involvement, and almost certainly no indirect involvement.
It’s the same with other constitutional upheavals in Commonwealth kingdoms, such as the dismissal of Prime Minister Whitlam in Australia. The late Queen was too smart to get involved in such crises; she’d let them play out locally - usually between the prime minister and governor-general of the country concerned - without interfering herself. This was not just a question of political manoeuvering but also of being aware of her limits as a constitutional monarch.
James VI/I had several variant designs to try and make up for not getting the parliaments to unite the countries - some examples here:
Of course you could say there’s a Welsh red dragon in the red cross, but it’s just not outlined.
Just for fun, I had a go at trying to combine the 4 flags in various different ways and it’s not easy; the Welsh dragon flag is a superb design on its own, but it doesn’t combine well with the components of the UJ, just because it’s a different category of emblem; even on the example I linked above, the central position of the dragon, combined with lines all pointing toward it, makes it seem like it’s the most important element; certainly it’s a shame that Wales is not represented on the extant flag, but putting the dragon in the middle goes somewhat to the other extreme.
On the example with the yellow borders outlining the red (St George) cross, the yellow is in the wrong place (the yellow cross on the St David flag occupies the same space as the red cross on St George, so I think if there’s going to be a yellow cross it would have to be share the space with the red cross, asymmetrically (like the white and red saltires of St Andrew and St Patrick) - except when you try to introduce that much radial symmetry, it genuinely starts to look a bit spidery, even swastika-like - and although the swastika is a fine emblem in places where it existed and cultures who were already using it before the 1920/30s, it’s not a great choice to start using afresh, now.
It’s also worth keeping in mind one of the fundamental laws of heraldics and vexillology: That metals (white and yellow, representing silver and gold) should not be adjacent to other metals, and colours (everything else) should not be adjacent to other colours. The existing Union Jack obeys this rule, as do most of the flags of the world, at least by and large (the US flag is an exception: there are some locations where the blue from the canton is adjacent to the red of the horizontal stripes; but this is a minor violation of the rule). It’d be difficult to combine the Union Jack with the Welsh dragon or colours in a manner that respects the rule.