David Davis
I am not always precisely in tune with my colleague Sean Gabb, regarding the failings of Elizabeth-the-Useless. Although he is quite correct in stating that she _could have_ blocked Rome, the SEA, Maastricht, Amsterdam, Nice and Lisbon at any time when these were issues. On any one of these – and the earlier the more chance of success – The Queen could have refused to assign her signature to any of this pretentious socialist rubbish, could have forced a General Election, and prevented the Franco-Collectivisto-Gramscian re-Nazification of Europe, saving her own subjects hundreds of billions of Sterling, not to say even trillions, in the process. We might even have got our managed-fisheries back before they were destroyed utterly (ask my father, who worked in the 70s for the MAFF, and who is now dead.). And at least up to Nice, she might also have got away with it. It would have been wise to resist early on.
But she continues to continue to soldier on, probably because she reminds the masses of their favourite great-aunt (I also have one, my aunty Betty who is actually a real aunt for I am rather old now and who even looks and sounds like the Queen a lot, and is only slightly older) or Grandmother.
As the Queen is old, and as she is a woman, and as it is not suitable to impeach or charge women for high treason – at least not “directly” – I would like to cleave to the position that “The Queen has been very, very badly advised, continually, for 61 years, in the matter of her constitutional dealings with the EuroNazis of the EUSSR”.
Any incoming British Libertarian administration would, I am quite sure, want to retain a Constitutional Monarchy in the United Kingdom. It’s all very well to be Democratic-People’s-English-Revolutionary-Liberalists, as is right and good: this party will appear and soon, whether I but _//Revolution//_ means “A Turning Back To” times when things were properly ordered. GramscoStaliNazis, and even their lackeys and running dogs the GramscoFabiaNazis, get this tragically upside down, totally. They think that “revolution” means “doing something in the future”. It does not.
Human affairs are blind to the future, like “art”. That is why to a first approximation, 100% of all “modern art” or “post-modern” art or “avant-guarde-art” (whatever that may be) is unviewable crap and shit, and is thus rubbish and strategically-unexhibitable, for “art” is blind to the future that it can’t know or see. I mean, to think it could do so is a tautology. (I didin’t mean to talk about art here right now, sorry – the Chimpanzee Type-writers got carried away in ducktape, howling about some Joan-Miro thing that had upset them about 20 years ago.)
Sod the art: To get back to the constistional Monarchy of the United Kingdom…the Queen has always been “allowed to maintain” the position that she is “above politics”. With hindsight, I’m not sure what that was supposed to mean – or, given that the incumbent was hopefully intelligent and aware – whether he/she should have had no input. We learn, through a glass darkly, that she didn’t like Margaret Thatcher at all, and liked Harold Wilson and James Call-Again rather a lot. I don’t know what the position is with David Camera-On yet even though he’s been in the apprenticeship for over three years now, but it would be interesting to know.
The English Civil War gave our country a rather interesting and untypical position for the time, among advanced modern states. We did get rid of the Monarch, we temporarily substituted a sort of committee headed by a strongish proto-political-liberal (who might not have been so liberal in other ways however) and then we got tired of it after about a decade. We let back the son of the ex-Monarch as a King under certain conditions which he more or less fulfilled – although his people’s treatment of the remnants of the “committee” was shameful. Perhaps he couldn’t be everywhere at once, having so many women to shag and so little time.
Teflon of course comes to mind here. Teflon Tony, as we all know, now runs the world and carries no traces of the crud, or even the smell, of taking us into Iraq and Afghanistan, where we lost collectively thousands of soldiers for no reason, to advanced weapons (not makeable by babies or children) such as roadside IEDs provided by Pakistan, Russia, France and others with none of whom are we supposedly at war.
It would not be right really, to do anything at this stage to upset Elixzabeth-The-Useless, I suppose, as there will be no point. It is also sadly improbably that Charlie-the-Chav-Criticiser will be little or no improvement. Please rememmber that Prince Charles is on record as saying “_people have got to get over their obsession with cheap food“_ .
At least Elizabeth-the-Useless has not committed herself yet ot the “food debate”. This is about whether people ought to be allowed to buy the foods they like, any sorts of foods, from whom they like, and if willing sellers ought to be allowed to sell it to willing buyers.
we can be thankful for small mercies.
There was an occasion when the Queen intervened very effectively to maintain constitutional government but her powers were used by her Governor General of Australia, Sir John Kerr.
The Labour government of Gough Whitlam tried to overturn the constitution. The Australian Senate, having more or less the powers of the House of Lords before the Parliament Act of 1911, refused to vote supply so the government ran out of money and started to issue IOUs instead.
Unlike the Lords, the Australian Senate is elected.
As neither side would give way, Sir John declared a double dissolution of both Houses of the Australian Parliament so that the people could decide. Whitlam refused to continue as caretaker Prime Minister, so the Governor General used the royal prerogative power and appointed the leader of the opposition instead. He did take advice on the matter but only within Australia from the Lord Chief Justice .
Of course, the Australian Labour party tried to portray this as Cavaliers v Roundheads with themselves as the champions of Parliament against the agents of privilege and the Pommy Queen. The people thought otherwise and denied Whitlam a majority in both Houses.
The difference between Australia and the UK is that the Australian constitution was codified and clear. The position of the Senate was also part of the guarantees of self government and influence of the constituent states of Australia.
I have sometimes wondered whether Sean might have a counter-factual book in mind, where the Queen tells Edward Heath that she will not assent to the European Communities Act 1972 unless her people are given an opportunity to vote on it in a fair referendum.
That would be an idea, Sean.Maybe you should speak to Mr.Blake?
Mr Blake asks me to tell you that your request has been received and noted..
I think Sean ought to ask Mr Blake to write something about that.
She has no power to override Parliament. The royal assent is purely a fiction, and she has no right to actually deny a law passed by the Parliament. We keep a figurehead monarch purely as a means to maintain the fictions of our Constitution, since it is all based on precedent and removing the pretend-monarch would negate the Constitutional system and act as a reboot, which nobody intends to allow to happen.
So, it is not really her fault that she is useless. Her job description is “do nothing”. She is, effectively, as much a prisoner of the system as the rest of us. We cannot know which of the laws she has obligatorially assented to she personally disapproved of, or found even repungnant. She may lay abed at night dreaming of having a genuine power of assent, like the American president whose role is modelled on English monarchs in the days when there was a balance of power between monarchy and Parliament, for all we know. But she has no power to do anything but what she does; which is nothing in practise but represent the origin of power in the Constitution. We could have a budgerigar for King and it would serve the same purpose, and also be cheaper to house and feed. But that is not the Queen’s fault.
I am also baffled by the apparent reference to Cromwell as a “proto-liberal”. Cromwell and his ideological descendents are the thread of history that has led us to our current immiserated state. If I fell through a hole in time to Naseby with a cache of modern weapons to give to one side or the other, they’d go to the Cavaliers, not the Roundhead GFNs. I live not so far from the battlefield and have often contemplated what might have been had the Roundheads got the thrashing I wish they’d got. I find it hard to believe that we could have been worse off, than what we got as a consequence of the triumph of those ghastly petty gentry.
“She has no power to override Parliament. ..”. Can you elaborate on this? The public perception (and mine) is that nothing passes into law without the Royal Assent, even if the last monarch to refuse it was Queen Anne or King George III or whoever.
If this is a fiction as you suggest, then she is living a lie and should go.
I am mystified by her actions, or rather inaction. I have written to her many times and got the same anodyne replies as everyone else. Ok, you will say she doesn’t see any of her mail, but she certainly presents that she does read all of her letters. If this is another lie, she should go.
It may be that she supports the idea of European Union, since so many of her ancestors were at each others’ throats in the Great War and she herself lived through the horrors of the Second. That is an honourable position, but to impose her views on her unwilling subjects in this way is not.
Maybe one can forgive her for agreeing to the 1972 E.C.A., but by the time of Maastricht, Amsterdam, Nice and indeed Lisbon, she must have realised what was going on and that her subjects did not want it. On the other side of the coin, however, her subjects infuriatingly kept voting in pro-EU governments, so what was she supposed to do?
What I find depressing is that the vast majority of people still adore her and tell us what a marvellous job she is doing. Do they never compare the fine,free country she inherited with the burgeoning multi-cultural Islamic EU Soviet protectorate she will leave behind her.
Hugo, our whole Constitution is a lie. It is openly a series of fictions. There is not even any official job of Prime Minister; supposedly the cabinet are merely advising the monarch on behalf of Parliament.
The royal assent is just a formality. She does not have a right to exercise it. She is living a lie, as are the whole establishment and indeed are the whole population. But each part of the system of lies supports the others, so that abolishing the monarchy would, constitutionally, abolish the Parliament too, since it is, in the lying system, it would now be an advisory body with nobody to advise.
The Monarch has no role in politics but if she has no role in constitutionalism then we may as well have a republic. When Norris and I presented the 1993 Treason charges at Court Norris referred to “Mrs Windsor being badly advised”. The British Monarchy could go the way of the Italian or German versions and for the same reason – the State was betrayed and conquered and they had to go.
“The royal assent is just a formality. She does not have a right to exercise it.”
Well, which is it? A formality or a fiction? Is it correct that nothing passes into law without the monarch’s signature or not?
Yes, that is correct. But she is obligated to sign. She is like one of those fortune telling automatons in a funfair. She does not have any constitutional right to consider whether or not to sign. So in effect, the act of signing is a formality, the concept of assent, which implies volition, is a fiction.
There are many people sadly who do believe that the “Royal Assent” is a volitional act. Many of them, before the Lisbon Treaty was passed into law, petitioned the Queen to not assent to it, like Russian peasants petitioning the Tsar. The difference is rather saddening; after the Russian revolution reams of petitions to the Tsar were found; he really had read them and had a Constitutional (monarchichal) obligation to respond, indeed they had apparently taken up much of his time. Some of the Lisbon petitioners seemed quite disappointed that they had received only formal replies from a civil servant, as if they really thought the queen would receive and read a letter from a commoner addressed to Mrs Queen, Buckingham Palace, London. But that is not how it works in England. Under our constitution, we are far less connected to the monarch than Russian peasants.
Mind you, I doubt that Mr Obama reads letters addressed to Mr President, The White House, Washington, either. But he does have the choice of whether to grant assent to new laws. The Queen does not have that choice.
And to be fair here, hoping a monarch will restrain the Parliament is rather useless anyway. If we persist in electing evil men and women to govern us, especially if its on the “anything but the Labours” principle, we deserve all we get. I said over at the Tele yesterday, on yet another “oh noes, nanny state” article; we have the power to stop this with one single general election. Everyone who votes for the three main parties is throwing that chance away. Anyone who voted for Mr Cameron, knowing full well that he would continue to extend our oppression, has no right to complain at all. All of our freedoms rested on wise choices at the ballot box, and we actively as a society threw them all away. Ultimately, the people of Britain re to blame for this. Not the Queen.
Very illuminating. And with the comments, even more so. To educate my countrymen, I’ve reprinted it over thisaway here:
http://ex-army.blogspot.com/2013/10/good-queen-second-rate-bess.html