Information I'd love to know

Annachie wrote:I'd love to know if the Mesan planners took prolong into account in their plans.

Hutch wrote:

Annachie wrote:I'd love to know if the Mesan planners took prolong into account in their plans.

I don't see how they could have initially, since the 'plan' is centuries old and prolong is not much more than a century since fielding.

I am sure that it has been part of the discussions since then my the "Inner Onion".

Let me put it to you; is there any need to revise the plan due to prolong? I'm not sure that it makes a difference.

Hutch wrote:

Annachie wrote:I'd love to know if the Mesan planners took prolong into account in their plans.

I don't see how they could have initially, since the 'plan' is centuries old and prolong is not much more than a century since fielding.

I am sure that it has been part of the discussions since then my the "Inner Onion".

Let me put it to you; is there any need to revise the plan due to prolong? I'm not sure that it makes a difference.

saber964 wrote:

Hutch wrote:OK, one for me.

I just did a re-read of Mission of Honor (it's better the fifth or sixth read) and during Detwiler's meeting with the leaders of the 11 other planets involved, all of the leaders are named, along with their systems they rule...except one.

Here's what I have:

Detweiler--Darius
Hurskinen-Mannerheim
Ford--Matagorda John Ford
Thompson--New Madagascar
Polanski--Line Roman Polanski
Hitchcock--Visigoth Alfred Hitchcock
Kakadelis--Thrace
Stone--New Orkney Oliver Stone
Monticelli--Comstock
Tarentino--New Bombay Quinton Tarentino
Lucas--Denver George Lucas
Kubrick-- ???? Stanly Kubrick

Just an 'oops' by the author, or did RFC want to reserve the location as a 'surprise' for us later in the series?

Hmmmmm.....

Did any one notice all the names of famous film directors in that list.

cthia wrote:I'd like to know the contents of Pavel Young's will? He didn't love or care about anyone other than, Pavel.

Vince wrote:

cthia wrote:I'd like to know the contents of Pavel Young's will? He didn't love or care about anyone other than, Pavel.

If he hadn't previously served in the RMN* I would say he probably wouldn't have one, since other people didn't exist except for his amusement in his view of the universe revolves around him.

*Armed forces tend to require their servicemembers to have wills and other legal details taken care of before they are deployed.

No law saves the Queen?
February 16, 2011 9:30 PM Subscribe
Is there a mechanism enshrined in law by which the British monarchy could be removed by a popular vote?
posted by vapidave to Law & Government (19 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite



no.
posted by wilful at 9:31 PM on February 16, 2011 [5 favorites]


I'm far from a Britain specialist, but things like this get complicated quickly by the... interesting... nature of the British constitution.

Arguably, there is a method, since one of the principles that make up the British constitution is that Parliament is unlimited; there is no law that Parliament cannot pass. So, Parliament is arguably free to abolish the monarchy. Or free to pass a law setting up a referendum on the monarchy.

OTOH, I'm sure someone could make a reasonable argument that doing so is in some way impossible.

Parliament has already (effectively) abolished the monarchy once, and removed specific monarchs from power more than once.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 9:56 PM on February 16, 2011


No is the only correct answer here, if you mean a popular vote in the UK.

Australia held a referendum in 1999 on whether we should become a Republic with a President. We voted No, so we'll never know what would have happened.

One model of how a move to disestablish a monarchy by the popular vote has been done in another comparable constitutional monarchy was the 1931 abdication of Alfonso XIII; Republican candidates simply won a majority, the King took it as a de facto Referendum and abdicated, left the country, and the Cortes (Spanish Parliament) simply drafted up a new Constitution. Note, however, that in the transition to democracy after General Franco died, Alfonso's heir Juan Carlos was brought back to a constitutional monarchy, effectively, by fiat of the military dictator.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 9:57 PM on February 16, 2011


No, and indeed, isn't it the other way around? The government of the day isn't actually elected. They hold an election, and the party with the most votes is politely invited by the Queen to form a government. So she gets to choose the government, technically. The government doesn't get to choose the monarch.
posted by AmbroseChapel at 10:00 PM on February 16, 2011 [3 favorites]


Your question misunderstands the fundamental nature of the British monarchy. It is basically the army, police, and other pledged servants of the Crown who would decide, after such a vote, whether their loyalties lay with the monarchy. Monarchy was not created by a vote, and it would not be abolished by a vote. I'm sure other people can explain this better than me.
posted by shii at 10:01 PM on February 16, 2011


To the best of my knowledge, there is no existing mechanism enshrined in law by which the British monarchy could be removed by a popular vote.

However, UK has an uncodified constitution, so the Parliament can remove the monarchy simply by enacting a law whenever there is enough public demand and support for it (else the next government would just bring the monarchy back).
posted by vidur at 10:44 PM on February 16, 2011 [1 favorite]


Well, the English parliament did put a king up for trial and find him guilty of treason and executed him ...

but 11 years later, all of the men who presided over his trial were executed as traitors and regicides. They even dug up the since deceased Cromwell to dismember him in retribution.

As far as I know, sovereignty in Britain still rests in the monarch-in-parliament -- that is, the parliament has no sovereignty without the monarch, but the monarch needs the parliament. Abolishing the monarch would be redefining sovereignty. Same would be true for all the other monarchies in the Commonwealth.
posted by jb at 11:02 PM on February 16, 2011


AmbroseChapel is very right to say that the Queen chooses the government, and it just so happens that she (usually) chooses the party with the majority of the seats. She doesn't have to; in the period before parties really gained influence, monarchs choose the executive government at will. But since the 16-17th centuries, there has been a strong tradition that sovereignty rested not in the parliament alone (Cromwellians disagreed, but they lost the Restoration) nor in the King alone, but in the combination -- the king-in-parliament.
posted by jb at 11:09 PM on February 16, 2011


For centuries the British have rationalized their entire government as powers delegated by the King/Queen. Laws, appointments, documents (passports, etc), and so on.. none of them are technically valid until endorsed by the monarch or one of her agents.

The British monarch is the "fount of honour" and "fount of justice".

So let's suppose parliament did pass a law removing the monarch. Suddenly everyone is asking the question, "under what authority am I doing this?" What is my authority to pass laws? Represent England? Pass judgement on defendants? When it comes time to dissolve parliament or choose a new prime minister, no one would know how to go about it. There's a huge gapping hole that has always been occupied by 'royal assent'.

Suddenly you would lose an important, critical part for the rules on how to run government. Look closely at any well functioning democracy and you'll see a delicate web of rules and conventions that everyone has agreed to abide by. They're like axioms in theoretical mathematics: they're just assumed to be true and then everything else flows from them.

Think of it this way: what if the American people voted to no longer follow the constitution? Before we went through with anything so drastic we'd have to sit down and figure out under what new procedures we were going to run the country. Same thing with voting out the monarch.
posted by sbutler at 11:10 PM on February 16, 2011 [3 favorites]


The government doesn't get to choose the monarch.

Like ROU_X, I think it's a more delicate balance, although it's concealed under various layers that emphasise continuity over discontinuity. The Act of Settlement remains the presiding law to this day, meaning that Parliament (not 'the government') does get to choose the monarch, albeit at a 310-year remove from its original decision.

What makes it tricky is that the deliberate non-separation of powers of 'the Queen in Parliament' again emphasises both continuity and mutuality. So it depends what you mean by 'mechanism': no, there isn't any existing legal framework in place to dump the monarchy by popular vote, but absence isn't the same as prohibition.
posted by holgate at 11:12 PM on February 16, 2011


I think holgate pretty much has it. If Parliament sensed that the popular mood was in favour of a republic, there would probably be a referendum, but for political rather than legal reasons--there is no mechanism in the UK polity for a referendum on anything--and an Act would be passed to render the UK a republic, which the Queen would give the royal assent to as her last official act as monarch. Nothing would stop a future Parliament conferring the title of king or queen on anybody it chose.
Lawyers worry about stuff like this but politicians don't. They may think they do, but in the end a constitution is a political document not a legal one. In any reasonably democratic political system, the right to govern basically depends on assent by the governed. As was pointed out a couple of times above, England/the UK has had at least two revolutions over the last few hundred years. I'll bet that during the Glorious Revolution of 1688 life for most people carried on exactly as before, and most people didn't even notice that the old king had fled to France and that the thrones of England and Scotland were now held by a Dutchman.
posted by Logophiliac at 12:19 AM on February 17, 2011

kzt wrote:Yes, but not what you mean. The government can, with a super-majority vote of both houses, "retire" a current monarch. But there is then automatically a new one.

Changing that requires changing the entire underlying government law.