71–80 of 210 posts
The British constitution is complicated.
In the UK we generally ignore this problem because we "know" that the Queen will not bring about a constitutional crisis because she realises that presented with a choice between the duly elected Prime Minster of the day and The Queen, all of us democratic citizens will of course choose the elected politician ... no wait ... err hang on ... The British constitution is complicated.
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> ordinary britons would notice zero change But that only proves that what we have now is an elective dictatorship where the Prime Minister of the day effectively exercises all the powers of the sovereign, without any real accountability or separation of powers. Removing powers from the Queen (or even just codifying them in a written constitution) would be the first step towards fixing this democratic deficit and all…
> elective dictatorship where the Prime Minister of the day effectively exercises all the powers of the sovereign, without any real accountability or separation of powers (As an American) this is a more pessimistic view of how it appears to me. Maybe I'm being naive but the voice of the people does appear to provide accountability. The idea that David Cameron felt the need to resign after the Brexit vote because he n…
Our constitution is built on the so-called 'good chap theory of governance', which is that power is in the hands of people 'like us', and therefore reasonable. If the PM loses a vote of no confidence he's obliged to resign. What makes him? Nothing. But that's the convention and it's been followed until now.
It's also a constitutional convention to resign from ministerial office if caught lying to Parliament. (Yes, really!) That one, though, looks defunct: Boris Johnson is a serial liar, and has managed to get himself referred to the Privileges Committee of the Commons for lying over his lockdown breaches despite his majority in the Commons. Will he resign? Will he hell. He doesn't want to, and all the Commons can do is bring the whole government down (and even then only if he is prepared to resign then). He's made it clear he doesn't care, and the Conservative Party in the Commons has made clear they're not willing to face an election over it, so that's that.
A similar thing happened over the Prorogation of the House just before Brexit. That was fairly straightforwardly a contempt of Parliament, and the advice to prorogue was found to be unlawful by the Supreme Court. But nothing of consequence happened to those in charge as a result.
I'm grateful our political culture isn't quite as buggered as that of the US at this point, but I'd be grateful for slightly stronger guardrails against misconduct than simply hoping it doesn't happen.
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Can you do that without rebooting? Rebooting nations tends to be a messy affair. Just ask France.
Arguably every election that brings in a new government is a reboot. A revolution is more like wiping the drive and installing a new OS.
We’re a constitutional monarchy AND a democracy. The monarch is the disabled root account of the nation. The government is the sudoers
Love this analogy. As a Canadian...we have the same monarch, but our own Constitution / elected officials. So...we are ourselves in the sudoers file...but surely we are different under this analogy than our UK brethren? What are we a VM with sudo root?
So it’s maybe more like a Kerberos auth server with local configuration.
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We could get rid of the monarchy tomorrow and ordinary britons would notice zero change in our political and democratic freedoms. They are politically irrelevant, a few completely peripheral procedural and technical issues aside that make no real difference in the grand scheme of things. I'm not sure if that's an argument for or against keeping the monarchy to be honest. They're a historical vestigial appendage of th…
> They are politically irrelevant, a few completely peripheral procedural and technical issues aside that make no real difference in the grand scheme of things. At the very least they own huge parts of the country, and the Queen has (and exercises as per recent Guardian stories) vetos and opt-outs of the laws the rest of us must follow. Regardless of that, even as a basic principle our country reeks of deference and…
Tbh, if you look at the performance of the queen compared to the performance of recent prime ministers, well, let's just say it's not a shining example of democracy at it's best.
We’re a constitutional monarchy AND a democracy. The monarch is the disabled root account of the nation. The government is the sudoers
The queen was exercising secret veto power, I don't think root was disabled. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/commentisfr...
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We could get rid of the monarchy tomorrow and ordinary britons would notice zero change in our political and democratic freedoms. They are politically irrelevant, a few completely peripheral procedural and technical issues aside that make no real difference in the grand scheme of things. I'm not sure if that's an argument for or against keeping the monarchy to be honest. They're a historical vestigial appendage of th…
> ordinary britons would notice zero change But that only proves that what we have now is an elective dictatorship where the Prime Minister of the day effectively exercises all the powers of the sovereign, without any real accountability or separation of powers. Removing powers from the Queen (or even just codifying them in a written constitution) would be the first step towards fixing this democratic deficit and all…
No it doesn't. It just means it's irrelevant to ordinary life.
What they have has no bearing on how I live. Zero. Nada. Zilch.
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Can you do that without rebooting? Rebooting nations tends to be a messy affair. Just ask France.
"Every operating system then, and every threat model, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be deployed longer, it is legacy tech, and should be deprecated." - Thomas Jefferson
- Napoleon Bonaparte
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Sounds like the system would be simpler if we removed root and gave capabilities to the sudoers instead. Edit: why does the disabled root account allocate so much RAM?
President Boris. Sounds fantastic. Perhaps not though, yeah?