i believe it was more a name confusion thing. perhaps if the dowager queen had the same name as her daughter in law.
it really isn’t an official title. when attending an event together the announcements upon them entering would be:
her majesty queen elizabeth
her majesty the queen
it was more an unformal thing when discussing what the queen was up to that day or what ever the discussion.
A “ministerial act “ is a little different from what @Loach is talking about. Ministerial acts are ones that do not require any judgement or allow any discretion. For example, if a person presents specified documents and attains a specified score on a written test the department of motor vehicles must issue a learner’s permit. If the documentation is not sufficient or the necessary score isn’t reached , a permit may not be issued. The clerk at the counter has no discretion about whether or not to issue the permit. Loach is talking about something a little different The queen’s assent is ceremonial and therefore really meaningless - if the Queen must assent then her assent doesn’t matter. It’s as if the president was required to sign every bill that passed both houses of Congress. If the Queen/King/President must sign , then there is no point to having that step.
This is not accurate and fundamentally misses the point of the reserve powers held by the Crown in a constitutional monarchy. It’s not like your DMV example where the clerk must follow the law and has no discretion. The monarch is not a clerk; the monarch is Head of State and their discretionary reserve powers are quite real and an essential part of the Westminster parliamentary system.
The fact that some of those powers, like the power to withhold assent to legislation, have rarely or never been exercised in Commonwealth countries that have constitutional monarchies is not because the monarch “has to” give assent, but because there hasn’t been a reason to withhold it. But other reserve powers have, in fact, been exercised, like the power to determine who forms the next government when the election fails to produce a clear majority, or to determine whether or not a parliamentary session should be prorogued.
The monarch or their representative is Head of State and their reserve powers function as important emergency powers that can be exercised when needed in order to maintain a stable government. It’s both practically and symbolically important to have a Head of State who can be respected as an impartial arbiter and not subject to criticism as a political hack.
According to a quick Googling, the last time a British monarch actually refused royal assent was in 1708. What sort of circumstances would have to transpire for Chucky 3 to do so?
Good question. Hope we don’t find out.
The Lt gov of PEI denied Royal assent to a bill in the 1940s.
The GovGen of Australia sacked the PM in the 1970s.
The lt gov of BC refused a dissolution in 2017, forcing the premier to resign.
Not ribbon cutting.
It would most likely lead to the end of the monarchy.
There could be a few instance where he could get away with it-
the law was badly written, so it legally says the opposite of what it was intended to do (this has occurred several times)- but that wasnt caught until afterwards. So Parliament begs Charles to not sign it.
A huge wave of public opinion swells after a law was quickly passed. The public hates it 80% or so. Even Parliament is starting to admit it was a bad idea.
I would say likely not, because the circumstances that would actually cause the King to refuse assent would likely be something truly exceptional, where there would be broad public support for that refusal. Suppose that a government passed something not only wildly unpopular (which happens with some regularity), but also wildly beyond the bounds of the conventions of Parliament. Say, having a majority in the Commons and sufficient sway in the House of Lords, the government passed a bill making membership in any opposition party punishable by life in prison, ignoring all objections that such a bill violates fundamental rights. In this admittedly far-fetched hypothetical, Charles could probably not only refuse royal assent, but also dissolve Parliament and call an election without being so advised by the PM, and get away with it.
Neither of these cases would rise to that level, however. In the first, Parliament would simply pass a new bill repealing the old. In the latter, the monarch would grant royal assent, and the people would be able to convey their opinion of the bill in the next election. If mere unpopularity were grounds for withholding royal assent, it would happen more than once in 3 centuries.
The last time it happened seems to have been closer to #1 - Parliament had passed a bill to rearm the Scottish militia, but after it passed there was news of a French-backed Jacobite uprising (which ultimately failed to materialize) and there were concerns that the Scots would join the uprising, so Queen Anne’s ministers advised her to withhold assent.
The chances of a Jacobite uprising these days are pretty slim, so that particular set of circumstances is unlikely to pop up any time soon.
You guys don’t have the thing where the chief justice becomes “officer administering the government” while the (lt-)governorship is vacant?
If the LtGov is out of the province or sick, yes. But if the office is vacant , nothing can be done until a new LtGov is appointed.
Well, that’s unimaginably worse.
I could imagine tolerating the monarchy in a purely ceremonial role that doesn’t matter in any way. Sort of like tolerating a sports team’s mascot.
But if they have “real and essential” powers, then investing those powers in some inbred bloke based on his great great great […] great grandpa being better at killing than his rivals starts to feel deeply immoral.
As discussed upthread:
allegations of inbreeding are a cheap and inaccurate slur made by critics of the monarchy, without basis in reality;
Charles does not hold his position by virtue homicidal tendencies of an ancestor, but by statutes passed by the English and then British Parliament.
Statutes which just coincidentally happened to specify that the throne was to remain in the hands of the family that had the most homicidal ancestors.
He might only be mildly inbred for a royal, but he has fewer great-great-great-grandparents than us mudbloods. And those great-great-great-grandparents didn’t exactly have a deep gene pool to begin with.
Oh, and I suppose this ancestor was picked by Parliament entirely based on merit, yes? He wasn’t descended from a particularly effective warlord?
Don’t forget that their great great great… grandpas were best at exploiting the common people. And stealing, in general.
So the argument being advanced by advocates of republicanism who don’t understand constitutional monarchies seems to be (a) the monarchy should be abolished because it’s useless, and then, on being informed that it’s actually an integral part of the system of government, then changing that to (b) the monarch should be abolished because it’s not useless.
The problem with a republican system that combines the power of the head of (the executive branch of) government with the power of head of state into a single position of extraordinary power is that a dangerous criminal demagogue like Trump can contrive to ascend to it. And that, to me, is far more deeply immoral and downright dangerous than having a constitutionally limited monarch and a Westminster style parliamentary system. Not to mention the international embarrassment and erosion of soft power of having an orange imbecile acting as your nation’s head of state on the world stage.
I’ll expand a bit on what @Northern_Piper said about the monarchy existing by virtue of statutes passed by Parliament. IMHO the British constitutional monarchy and the ones in Commonwealth countries are philosophically a bit different. Britain supports an actual royal family with all the pomp and circumstance that surrounds it. It continues to exist because what is relevant in a modern constitutional monarchy is not the ancient history but the deeply rooted sense of public duty wherein the monarchy exists in harmony with a modern democracy.
In Commonwealth countries like Canada, the ceremonial and the practical governmental functions are carried out by the Governor General. The GG is nominally appointed by the British monarch “on the advice of” the Prime Minister, but since Canada is fully sovereign that really means that the monarch’s function is ceremonial and the GG is appointed by the Prime Minister. That person is traditionally a distinguished Canadian who is respected as impartial and non-political and can be trusted to exercise their limited but important powers responsibly.
The Lady of the Lake, her arm clad in the purest shimmering samite, held aloft Excalibur from the bosom of the water, signifying by divine providence…
Everybody has Homicidal ancestors.
Due to pedigree collapse I will contest that most English have the maximum number of great-great-great-grandparents.
I don’t know about you, but I have no confidence in saying that about my own ancestry.
One set of my great-grandparents came from a small town in Scotland. Given the lack of physical mobility in rural Scotland (prior to railroads in the mid-19th century), and social class restrictions, I would be really surprised if those two did not have family connections in their family tree.
Another part of my ancestry came from a small (really small) town in north Wales. Again, given lack of physical mobility and social class restrictions, I assume there was some degree of familial inter-marriage.
Another branch were Irish settlers in the rural Ottawa valley, again coming from a single area, this time from Northern Ireland. Low population densities in the settler area, shared ethnic background from the same region of Ireland, social restrictions on inter-marrying, and religious restrictions (Protestant Irish would not generally marry Catholic Irish at that time in Canada), so again, inter-marrying with family connections would not be unknown.
Overall, I would be very surprised if my family background didn’t have some inter-marrying, to the same degree as Charles. The difference is that there aren’t genealogies of my family published in books and online to make it easy to show that John Macdonald in rural Scotland married his cousin Mary Buchanan.