( A three-minute read)
The UK anthem got me thinking…
If you were starting a 21st-century democracy from scratch you wouldn’t
dream of having a hereditary head of state.
These days this is undoubtedly true, it is also true that the history of the past 50 years ago shows that starting democracies from scratch is very hard.
“Is there any point in the Royal family?”
The Royals represent and reiterate that the class system is still firmly in place in the UK.
If the monarchy is to continue in modern Britain they will have to adapt and change. The modern Royal Family must continue to live more in touch with their subjects if they are to survive as an institution in a democratic 21st Century Britain.
Leaving the EU won’t affect the Royals it will however change the Brit culture and add much-needed collective synergy aspiring for common aims.
So is a Royal Family still relevant today, it’s all about equality, and right now, so are they just a parasitic anarchic family blessed with vast riches, or are they essential to a country with no written constitution.
It is hard to shake off the debilitating tag when the head of state and her hangers-on attain their positions not through popularity, talent, or industry, but by the mere fact of their birth.
Presently England is recognized as a monarchy…BRITS ARE SUBJECTS OF THE MONARCH. Ultimately the Parliament and the army are under the control of her highness.
The Royal family aren’t elected, which can be seen as undemocratic.
They inherit their status and for this to apply to a nation that’s so heavy on encouraging democracy it may be seen as hypocritical.
They cost the taxpayer approximately 52p each year
Queen Elizabeth II, is the legal owner of about 6,600 million acres. The value of her landholding. £17,600,000,000,000 (approx). She is the only person on earth who owns whole countries, and who owns countries that are not her own domestic territory.
The Queen may be a constitutional monarch, in which her roles as the head of the state are mostly just symbolic, as she occasionally represents Britain in her state visits – so her holidays are covered as well?
Royalists will say that having a Monarchy makes no difference to the validity of democracy. Just so long as the Monarchy doesn’t interfere with the democratic process of the nation then they are nothing more than national figureheads with no real power or influence.
This may well be so.
Yet in theory, at least, she has considerable powers: to wage war, sign treaties, dissolve Parliament, and more.
They will also say that the monarchy is needed for tourism and the economy. That’s NOT what it’s there for. It’s there for political reasons.
To keep Britain’s monarchy does not entail keeping it in its current form. Britain would be a lot stronger if its head of state were elected.
Why?
Because its entangled history of democracy and monarchy has left Britain with a highly centralized constitution that locates the nation’s sovereignty in “the king in parliament”—a situation that gives the leader of the majority party in the legislature a disturbingly large part of the power that was once vested entirely in the monarchy.
This situation could be remedied quite easily by keeping the crown but changing its constitutional basis to one along the lines of that most excellent of countries, Belgium.
Belgium is a popular monarchy. Its constitution makes clear that sovereignty rests in the people; the King (or Queen, though it has yet to have one)—who is King of the Belgians, a people, not Belgium, a territory— becomes monarch not by right, but by taking an oath to uphold the people’s constitution.
Without a written constitution the question is: Who elected the royal family, they are self-made, what makes them royal? After all, basically, they are German immigrants.
I have nothing against them personally, as I am a humanist at heart and these people are simply other human beings born into their roles.
Britain has a class system which, to be honest, is going to rip that country apart and the royal family is a symbol of that class system and the divide will ultimately dissolve.
All that says;
They are just some human beings, related to every other living organism on our Earth in some way. The fact that a monarchy is not intellectually justifiable does not mean that it does not have a stabilizing role.
To have a real sovereign Nation you need to be free of the monarchy in order to be truly free. To bow down and call somebody ‘your highness?’ It doesn’t make sense to me.
The case against hereditary appointments in public life is straightforward: they are incompatible with democracy and meritocracy.
The second pitfall is subtler: in the belief that the monarchy forms some kind of constitutional backstop against an over-mighty Parliament, Britain is strangely relaxed about the lack of serious checks on its government.
Because it has no written constitution; the current government has plans to repeal a law implementing the European Convention on Human Rights, which many Britons recklessly consider a nuisance rather than a safeguard.
A change to the British constitution which made the kingdom’s various people’s sovereign and the head of state the guardian of that sovereignty, not the source of it, would be a welcome plank in the more general program of reform that the British state clearly needs. The trouble with hereditary succession and leaving the European Union is that you never know quite who or what you’re going to get.
The fourth verse of the UK anthem reads “rebellious Scot to crush” just thought that’s worth mentioning! The Royal family was the most ruthless biggest crooks at some point.
Pressing Articular 50 to disconnect from the EU in a world that is all about connectivity to my mind is Artificial Intelligence personified.