I guess being raised as a good American where we have a (theoretical) check and balance system which we see as compromise and others see as roadblocks. I know that the Parliament Act was passed to do away with what was viewed as a way to prevent the House of Lords blockage of the “people’s budget” but it seems pretty drastic. And why was King George V willing to create peerages just to stack the HoL to ensure passage of the Parliament Act? Wasn’t their some sort of compromise available?
Now with the (albeit questionable) premise that a modern monarch would not withhold Royal Assent (I know some claim that the Queen lets it be know to the PM if there is a bill she would not sign her ER to so it never gets passed) and it seem like there is now know check on the House of Commons short of a vote. So what happens if tomorrow the HoC decides to declare war on Finland? Would QE2 withhold her Assent? Would she get a feel for public reaction and if necessary dissolve Parliament? Would she fire the PM and appoint a new one? What could the HoL do if anything?
The UK system has checks and balances. Just not so formally as the US system.
The final check on the system is consent of the governed. Monarchs have typically realized this, and allowed their powers to be eroded away slowly without revolution. It’s why there is a still a monarchy in the UK.
Similar forces work in the US as well - the Supreme Court sometimes restricts its actions knowing it is the unelected branch, and so in the final analysis does not have the legitimacy of a popular mandate. In the end, it cannot enforce its own findings (see Worcester v. Georgia) and some decisions seem just simply “wrong” but made with an eye towards not crossing the elected branches (see Korematsu v. U.S.). The Court may also chose not to take a case and call it a political question…
Parliament is supreme now because it didn’t use to be, and over the centuries it has gradually wrested power away from unelected monarchs and the aristocracy. Now that the franchise has been so broadened that virtually every sane adult in the UK has the vote, this seems to suit the great majority of Her Majesty’s subjects just fine (not that criticism of politicians as a class is any less bitter).
As to the Declaration of War on Finland 2010 Act example provided in the OP, yes, the House of Commons would be entirely within its rights to act that way. Astonishingly stoopid, yes, but within its rights. Neither the Queen nor the House of Lords could stand in its way, and if they did, I suspect they would quickly find themselves stripped of what little power they have left.
In practice, it’s the prime minister who exercises the most real power in the Westminster system. But the prime minister only hold office as long as he or she is supported by a majority in the House of Commons. That’s the really big check-and-balance in the system, because if the PM goes too far. 300-odd MPs can dismiss the PM. It hasn’t happened in the British House of Commons, but it must always come into the PM’s calculations.
(And it’s happened at least twice in the Australian Parliament, which uses a similar system. On 20 December 1991, Paul Keating defeated the incumbent PM Bob Hawke within the party caucus, and replaced him. On 3 October 1941, two independent MPs who had been supporting Arthur Fadden voted for a no-confidence vote in the House of Representatives, so that John Curtin became Prime Minister.)
So the PM relies on the support of the lower house (the Commons in the UK), and the MPs rely on the support of the voters in their electorates. In the end, it comes back to who has the support of the voters, and that’s why the system works.
Sure it has. Neville Chamblerlain is the best example. Even though he won the vote on the Norway fiasco, it was by such a narrow margin that he felt he had no option but to resign because he had lost the confidence of the House, opening the way for Churchill to become Prime Minister.
And more recently, Margaret Thatcher lost office because her caucus ousted her, under the internal rules of the Conservative Party. Not as dramatic as Chamberlain’s ouster, but a clear example of the Prime Minister losing office by failing to keep the support of the rank and file MPs.
Why shouldn’t the House of Commons have so much power? Americans are raised to believe in the superior value of a separation-of-powers system, and that investment of legislative and executive power in the same body is, in Alexander Hamilton’s (or was it Madison’s or Jay’s? no matter) words, “the very definition of tyranny”; but, in fact, parliamentary systems have at least as good a historical track record in terms of effective government and civil liberties. The Framers were wrong about a lot of things, maybe this was one of them.
Let me flip the question around: why is Congress so weak in the US system? The Democrats have a clear majority in both houses - so why can’t they pass their legislation?
Parliamentary systems have the virtue that if a party campaigns on a platform, and wins a majority in the Parliament, they normally can get their platform enacted, because the House of Commons (or equivalent in other Westminster system countries) is so powerful.
And, what’s more, the majority party has no excuse if it doesn’t fulfill its campaign promises. No plausible blaming-the-other-party, no plausible blaming-the-system, no buck-passing, much transparency. That’s what they call responsible government.
The Monarch is the last bastion against an overweening Prime Minister. The Monarch can refuse the Royal Assent. To do so would provoke a constitutional crisis. Nobody wants to go there. If Gordon Brown were to declare war on Finland without good justification, even if he could corral his MPs behind him, and successfully invoke the Parliament Act if the HoL refused, if HMQ were to refuse… well, she is much loved and respected and Gordon Brown isn’t. So they don’t go there.
Yes, well, some political problems have no conceivable institutional solution. But, at any rate, the government party can’t say the opposition party is blocking its way now.
This, of course, ignores the constitutional reality, where the Monarch is the veil behind which the Prime Minister hides when bypassing the House of Commons and ruling in a Presidential manner. Orders in Council (now semi-formalized under the Civil Contingencies Act) permit the executive to create law without reference to the House by using the monarch’s power.
A lot more often than commonly thought, though most were in the formative years.
There have been 26 Prime Ministers since Federation. The majority of these ** did not ** lose office at an election.
10 Prime Ministers have been defeated at a general election:
Deakin, Fisher, Cook, Bruce, Scullin, Chifley, McMahon, Fraser, Keating, Howard.
There have been 20 changes of Prime Minister without an election.
Vice-regal intervention: Whitlam
Voluntary departure: Barton, Fisher, Page, Forde, McEwen and Menzies
Party-room coups: Hughes, Menzies, Gorton, Hawke
Death: Lyons, Curtin, Holt
Defeat in Parliament: Deakin (twice), Watson, Reid, Fisher, Fadden
I don’t think the monarch is the last bastion, so much as one of several equal bastions.
In order for Britain to launch an attack on Finland, several authorities would have to go simultaneously insane:
The Prime Minister
Parliament
The voters
The armed forces
and, trailing the pack, the British monarch
I would even suggest that if the first three were in agreement in their hare-brained idea, the monarch’s views would be immaterial, and the invasion would go ahead.
That may be a fair characterization of the so called “Glorious Revolution” (called glorious, I believe, precisely because it entailed so little bloodshed and disruption), but it is absurd to call the events that led to the establishment of the Commonwealth a mere “coup.” There were many bloody battles involved, and a whole series of radical changes in the way the country was run and the ways people thought and lived their lives. Some of the events within the greater revolution might reasonably be called coups, but to say there was no revolution in this period flies in the face of the facts. In most respects it was a much more revolutionary event than the struggles that led to American independence, for example.
Yes, it got overturned, as many, perhaps most revolutions do (compare the French and Russian revolutions), but that does not make it in any way less of a revolution, and despite the restoration of the monarchy, the constitution and the culture of England were permanently changed. Unlike his father, who understood himself to rule by divine right, Charles II and his successors ever after had to operate as constitutional monarchs, recognizing that their power derived from the support of the people (generally as expressed through parliament). The English, so called Civil War (revolution is much more accurate) constituted a large and crucial step along the road to the democracy and parliamentary sovereignty that Britain enjoys today.
I’m sure you’re right. AFAIK, nobody asked the Queen’s opinion on whether to fight Argentina over the Falklands; it was enough that Thatcher, the Commons and the public were in general agreement. (Not suggesting that was an “insane” decision, it simply illustrates the point.)
But, at any rate, the government party can’t say the opposition party is blocking its way now.