And voluntarily.
I’ve got no dog in this fight at all. But to discount the ability of someone like the Queen or Prince Charles to draw out more donations that Joe Blow is simply silly. Just by associating with a specific charity they bring more attention and money to it.
It’s not like there’s a universe of ‘charity’ that remains constant. People WORK at getting donations for causes. Would people give to the Salvation Army in similar amounts if not for the bell ringers?
Certainly their charity work is good, and a positive factor. I just don’t think you need royals to do it, per se. If not Charles and Fergie, then whoever won X-Factor and the Chelsea manager.
It might be somewhat harder, partly because it would involved institutions unique to the United Kingdom, such as the position of Supreme Governor of the Church of England: a Republic Act would have to devise a new way of appointing bishops in the Church of England, and might involve disestablishing the Churches of England and Scotland. The biggest issue would be deciding, if there were a president as head of state of the United Republic of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, how that president got elected or appointed, and Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Australian states and other realms and dominions would face the same kind of problem.
They’re not as famous or influential. They’d be less effective. Plus they have their own careers to worry about without doing a near full-time job on top of that.
Near full time? I don’t know how busy the rest of the royals are, but HM’s diary is public record and really isn’t that full.
Compared to who, other octogenarians?
:dubious: And how exactly does this relate to the monarchy?
The Royal Family has 14 public engagements in the next 7 days. I’m really not sure what your point is. Some of the objections you’ve thrown up are really curious.
*Why can’t people like the manager of Chelsea FC do it instead? * If the manager of Chelsea football club was inclined to, as you suggest, involve himself heavily in charities, no doubt he would be doing so. Even were he to do so, it’s not a binary choice; he can do so in addition to the Royal Family.
Their work has no value because somebody else could do it. In that case, nothing that anybody in this world does has value, because somebody else could do it.
It’s clear you don’t value the royal charity work (you’ve worked hard enough to make that clear!) and that’s fine. I value it, however, and I suspect that many others do. In my mind, their work has value.
They work with nearly 3000 charities.
Disregard-acsenray told me he posted this in the wrong thread.
There is one in the police museum in Stockholm. It’s in mint condition, has only been used once.
Moved from IMHO -> GD.
That’s the stupid thing, though. Either the monarch is the head of the armed forces or the monarch isn’t the head of the armed forces. But to say, “The monarch is the head of the armed forces, but can’t actually tell the armed forces to do something without the consent of the Prime Minister”, then the monarch isn’t the head of the armed forces. The Prime Minister is. If you say “The monarch has to give royal assent to all bills”, but it hasn’t been done since 1707, and would cause a major crisis if it was done, then the monarch’s royal assent to bills is meaningless. Either the monarch actually has powers, or he or she does not (and don’t get me wrong, it’s probably better for Britain to be ruled by a representative government than an absolute monarchy), but it’s a marvelous piece of self delusion and hypocrisy on behalf of Great Britain to say, “The monarch has powers but may never use them independently.” It makes the monarch little more than the lenient host of a game of Mother-May-I.
Sure, it’s a challenge, but we know it’s not an insurmountable challenge. Several commonwealth realms have transitioned into republics. In fact, there are more republics-that-used-to-be-commonwealth-realms than there are current commonwealth realms. So there’s plenty of precedent that Australia or Canada could look to. Or the UK.
Sure - but it would take a major constitutional re-organization. It’s not possible to just say, “Her Majesty is dead, so I guess we’re a republic now.”
Well, it would require a decision, which might or might not involve a major constitutional reorganisation.
At its simplest, with minimal constitutional disruption, the powers and prerogatives of the crown could pass to another office created for the purpose, to be exercised by the holder(s) of that office on pretty much the terms that they are now exercised by the Queen. The main issue would be how to choose, and replace, the officeholders. (There would, of course, be a separate issue for other commonwealth realms about how to address the implications of this for their own constitutional arrangements.)
But presumably at least part of the case for replacing the monarchy might well be dissatisfaction with the current constitutional distribution of powers and prerogatives, in which case the idea of simply replacing the current monarch with someone else wouldn’t really address the perceived problem. Some wider constitutional reconceptualisation or reorganisation would be appropriate in that case.
At its simplest, even if the monarch were replaced by (say) a president who in practice filled a very similar role, it is unlikely that the president would be viewed as the “sovereign”; he would merely be an agent of the sovereign; the sovereign would be the republic, or the people. And, if nothing else, this view would tend to influence the future political and judicial development of the president’s role.
In a bad way IMO. A lot of damage can be done & justified in the name of “the people.” If you tell someone that he’s acting as an agent of the popular will (as if there were such a thing) he may believe it, & then we’re all in big trouble.
More likely to be the other way around, IMO. Currently the Queen is the sovereign. Any power of government for which no other explicit provision is made belongs to her. Even if there’s a convention under which she exercises it on the advice of her ministers, who are ultimately accountable to parliament, parliament has no direct involvement with or control over the exercise of the power, and may frequently not even be aware of an an exercise of the power. And of course if it’s a new or novel power, or a power arising in some new or novel situation, there’s always room for argument as to whether it’s covered by established constitutional conventions.
By contrast, if a hypothetical president is not sovereign, powers do not default to him, with or without the advice of ministers. A president who is agent of the sovereign people only has such powers as the scope of his agency gives him. The default is that a power or prerogative does not exist/cannot be exercised unless the people (through parliament, or other constitutional mechanisms) have enabled this.
We saw this, for example, in Ireland where state immunity from suit was junked by the Supreme Court on the grounds that the people were sovereign, and they had not, either in the constitution or through the parliamentary process, conferred immunity from suit on the state – an immunity which the crown had enjoyed when Ireland was a part of the UK. And the sovereignty of the people underlies a strong constitutional jurisprudence of human rights; for example, the Supreme Court cited the sovereignty of the people in rejecting a claim by the state that it could, as an exercise of the former crown prerogative, refuse to issue a passport to a citizen (so preventing him from travelling abroad).
I was thinking of Roman consuls & US presidents, both of which categories have rather more experience with republicanism than Ireland.
I don’t trust republics, as I have said in other threads. Ireland is pretty peaceful, having been only recently a colony itself. But democracies are scary rapacious things as a rule. The UK as a democratic constitutional monarchy conquered much of the world. If it had an elected “dear leader,” playing to his constituent electorate’s hope for glory & his hope to keep his job, I shudder to think what might have ensued.
Granted, the more power a PM has, the more moot the difference between the UK & a republic is.
Or, that isn’t what is said?
The Queen vetoing a bill and dissolving parliament is a political nuclear option*. Just because it is very rarely used (it’s not as if three hundred years is a particularly long period in a stable country’s history, is it? For instance, when does the US constitution expire?) doesn’t make it ineffective. Perhaps it is what has kept successive administrations within the bounds of reasonable behaviour.
Sandwich
Actually, Britain would better be described as an oligarchy during it’s conquering phase.