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The Queen has more power over British law than we thought

theguardian.com

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Re: The Queen has more power over British law than we thought

#541

Post by Dayshine »

deskamess wrote: post #508
AZRS wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All abolishing the monarchy would do is enable people with more wealth and status than me, many of which who I can expect to not only hate people like me far more than the current monarch, but to have self and group interests that are directly contradictory to my own wellbeing, along with ideological motivations that, if carried out, would be extremely harmful to me. At this point people who think the monarchy should…

Like the monarchy is not already richer than you! They definitely feel their status is above yours. At least the new rich overlords wont ask me to pledge allegiance to them during a citizenship oath like the do in Canada. Not just the queen, but also to her heirs like the great Prince Andrew The Pedophile.

Just because Americans take their citizenship "oaths" seriously doesn't mean anybody else does. It's a tradition not a contract. Do US citizens genuinely worship their nation?

Re: The Queen has more power over British law than we thought

#542

Post by dragonwriter »

tacostakohashi wrote: post #270
cameronh90 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a common sense perspective I agree with you. However I find it hard to reconcile it with the fact that many/most of the nicest countries on earth to live in are constitutional monarchies. Including Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Canada, Australia, UK, NZ and Japan. I don't know why this is, but it gives me pause in overthrowing the monarchy. It might be the existence of a monarch unites society in some way, or it…

If you're suggesting some kind of causal link between monarchs and nice places, it seems a bit unfair to count "Canada, Australia, UK, NZ" individually, it kinds of pads the numbers a bit since it's all the same monarch. Also, you haven't mentioned Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Grenada, Jamaica, Papua New Guinea, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Solomon Islands a…

> it seems a bit unfair to count "Canada, Australia, UK, NZ" individually, it kinds of pads the numbers a bit since it's all the same monarch.

Yeah, but all separate monarchies.

Re: The Queen has more power over British law than we thought

#543

Post by [deleted] »

bouncycastle wrote: post #276
cameronh90 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a common sense perspective I agree with you. However I find it hard to reconcile it with the fact that many/most of the nicest countries on earth to live in are constitutional monarchies. Including Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, Canada, Australia, UK, NZ and Japan. I don't know why this is, but it gives me pause in overthrowing the monarchy. It might be the existence of a monarch unites society in some way, or it…

Hmm.. might be "Survivorship bias"? The not-so-nice countries are more likely to remove their monarchies / nice are more likely to keep them? Also, Japan and the UK were not exactly nice when their monarchs had absolute power...

[deleted]

Re: The Queen has more power over British law than we thought

#544

Post by omerta »

scoopertrooper wrote: post #287
jopsen wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Also, every member of the royal family should be stripped of their wealth and exiled. From a democratic/ideological perspective you might be right. On the other hand, having a royal family it cute -- doesn't that count for something :) I live in Denmark where we also pay the royal family some money, few privileges, etc.. My personal pocket philosophy is that the money we pay the royal family is the cost of a peacef…

Bribing the monarch into being a figurehead is no guarantee either. For instance, the monarchy didn't stop the rise of Mussolini or Franco.

In that article, from an 80 old day comment of mine, you did not understand my comment. You told me to read the article. You don't understand what I mean by justification. There is a difference between prescription and description. That article was descriptive, not prescriptive. You cannot justify universals if you believe only particulars exist. You can only justify universals if you are willing to accept a metaphysical reality and provide a grounding for the metaphysical. Not everything is proven in the same way. The scientific method is good for studying particulars, but it cannot prove a universal. For example, science assumes the laws of logic in its process, which it cannot prove or provide a justification for. Also the scientific method cannot justify the scientific method. You on the other hand will probably say "because it works." Something working is a value-judgement, and that is not independent of ethics. It also assumes induction and regularity in nature, but you obviously haven't heard about the problem of induction. Science cannot provide a justification for induction. Science will also claim things like we know things from observation or what is in the sense data. Did we observe that or sense that in our sense data? I would say not everything is proven the same way. You can use science for some stuff, but not everything.

Re: The Queen has more power over British law than we thought

#545

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

konschubert wrote: post #528
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #423

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are mistaken. Almost every modern democracy has a bicameral legislature. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism

That's a fair point, but I don't think the house of lords really represents a second chamber? Usually that second chamber consists of representatives of federate states, such as the senate or the Bundesrat. How do the lords get elected?

As far as I'm aware the Lords aren't elected, so there's an argument there they should have less power???

Membership is granted by appointment or by heredity or official function

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Lords

Re: The Queen has more power over British law than we thought

#546

Post by neximo64 »

pasabagi wrote: post #105
s17n wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's ridiculous - in the US, at least, our failure to contain the virus was clearly due more to a substantial portion of the population not wanting to contain it (and this ambivalence being correctly reflected in the government's actions) than any failure of governance. Of course, these people were a minority, but that just leads to the question of the appropriate protection of minority rights in a democracy, to wh…

Well, in the UK, there are quite clear policy failures that led to deaths (two late lockdowns, 'eat out to help out', etc). It's not hard to see if you look at the graphs, and match them up to when the lockdowns were put in place. Polls showed that people in general were quite keen on lockdowns, as it so happens.

The data is also as close as you're going to get to accurate in the uk. Just on the topic of comparing graphs.. Again you have made so many assumptions.

Some countries have different methods for measuring covid deaths. For example you have to have tested positive before you died vs autopsy after vs if you died in a care home automatically covid.

Re: The Queen has more power over British law than we thought

#547

Post by crumbshot »

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #480
crumbshot wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it be a retroactive law? A new Act of Parliament would be needed anyway to establish the United Republic, it could be included in that. Perhaps as a 100% wealth tax on the first X people in line to the throne, or similar.

Exiling them as punishment for something they are doing now when it still is illegal is a retroactive criminal sanction.

It wouldn't be as a punishment or sanction, it would be a procedural event as part of the transition to a republic.

Re: The Queen has more power over British law than we thought

#548

Post by crumbshot »

7steps2much wrote: post #378
crumbshot wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand it, it is quite possible to do this within the rule of law. To avoid the monarch refusing to enact this, it would need to be done in two stages: 1. A new Royal Assent Act, that makes assent automatic upon a bill passing both Houses. Assuming this in itself receives assent, it would remove the monarch's power to veto or refuse a bill (a power that hasn't been used for over 300 years anyway). 2. A Repub…

I think what the other commenter was trying to say was not that it would be impossible to do so, but that it would not be "right", so to speak. While you could of course exile them like other countries have done in the past, why would you do that? What reasoning would you use to justify exiling them, striping them of their personal property etc. ? Abolishing the monarchy is one thing, it can be justified pretty easil…

It wouldn't have to be deemed a punishment, merely a procedural item as part of establishing the Republic of Britain and eradicating any trace of royal privilege.

> Technically just abolishing the monarchy / taking away their powers would suffice.

It wouldn't suffice, because they still derive a great deal of power from their inherited wealth. What's the point of abolishing the monarchy if we permit them to remain as landlords for huge swathes of the country? Then they're still lording it over people economically, even if no longer doing so constitutionally.

Re: The Queen has more power over British law than we thought

#549

Post by dodobirdlord »

throwaway_kufu wrote: post #501
dodobirdlord wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To which I normally say the US isn’t a democracy, but a Constitutional Republic. I don’t know why I do that, it only causes people to dig in deeper to their position. Perhaps because this is both pedantic and wrong? A state can be both a democracy and a republic, and many are, such as the United States.

Explain how the US is a democracy without providing the definition of a Republic and renaming that form of government as a democracy to suit your arguement.

Do you want a dictionary definition? Here’s the one from Google’s built-in dictionary.

de·moc·ra·cy

/dəˈmäkrəsē/

a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives.

You seem to think that you have some technical claim to correctness. You are in no sense correct, technical or otherwise. The reason that people probably get annoyed by your claim is that nobody likes a pedant, but a pedant who is not even correct by some pedantic argument is particularly irritating.

Moreover, nobody ever seems to subscribe to this weird definition where democracy is conflated with direct democracy except people trying to argue that the United States is not a democracy. I suspect motivated reasoning.

Re: The Queen has more power over British law than we thought

#550

Post by Blikkentrekker »

crumbshot wrote: post #547
Blikkentrekker wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exiling them as punishment for something they are doing now when it still is illegal is a retroactive criminal sanction.

It wouldn't be as a punishment or sanction, it would be a procedural event as part of the transition to a republic.

- They aren't prisoners of war; they're “detained enemy combatants”, so the Geneva Convention does not apply.

- It's not not a criminal incarceration; it's an involuntary psychiatric commitment so your usual rights to due process don't apply.

- You see, we're not giving lesser rights to this group; we're simply giving more rights to the other, so it's fine.

- It's not a form of punishment; it's simply a procedural event to exile, so we can do it to someone who committed no legal crime.

And this is the grim, grim reality of human rights. — simply doing the same thing under a different name is enough to overstep them.

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