The New York Times invited Jonathan Pie (who should need no introduction to readers of this blog) to explain to people in the US what is going with the British prime minister Boris Johnson and the scandal over the many parties he attended while his government was preventing anyone else from having any gatherings.
Pie was only too willing to oblige.
Tiny objection -- The Queen is not particularly similar to the US president. The president is head of state and head of government, while the monarch is only head of state -- a figurehead wrapped in tradition, but with no real political power.
I’d like to see Lewis Black and Jonathon Pie tell us what they really think.
no real political power.
She approves bills that are candidate for parliament and opens and closes parliamentary sessions. She doesn’t do it but she’s a sort of living potential constitutional crisis -- that’s not “no real power”, that’s “real power she does not wield” (except when she does a bit of nudge nudge wink wink)
I am tired when Brits say that the queen has no real power. Look, I get it, it’s embarrassing to confront that you live under an aristocracy disguised as a democracy. We Americans have to live with the embarrassment of our fake democratic oligarchy. We oughtta have some revolutions, guillotine these bastards, and set up some real democracies.
And that was the toned-down version.
Hah! I bet you also think she can also overturn the chosen PM in the ‘kissing hands’ audiences.
Holms @1: A huge difference between UK and US heads of state: After 70 years (today), Liz still has approval ratings that US Presidents would (I have no doubt) kill for.
@Holms
The Queen does have power, she and her staff are allowed to review and comment on any Bill that might affect her interests before that Bill is presented to Parliament, when comments are made they are not ignored. Which is why there are Acts that apply to everyone but the Queen and her family.
Jonathan Pie is funny; I only wish he were exaggerating.
The bin that is in the back of the pub with the scotch eggs which are not that gross compared to pickled pig’s feet, it is a dumpster. (Dumpster is band name of the large rectangular waste receptacle that you do indeed find in the back of a bar or a pub.) I make no comment on whether the dirty pig sex back against the wall among the broken glass is any fun…
If you tell a brit their queen has no power, they will tell you she certainly does with a ‘how dare you provincial colonial dare to comment on the superior likes of us’ tone of voice. If you tell a brit their queen has power, they will look at you with sheer disbelief that what a dumb american to have even said that and declaim loudly that they are more democratic than the US is. Sometimes this is even the same person. Both kinds will squirm if you call them subjects, which I do a lot.
@seachange,9:
“Dumpster is band name”
Are they a Garbage tribute act?
Fun fact :the Dumpster was invented by a chap named Dempster.
seachange @9: You seem to have met a very small number of rather peculiar brits. And if they are British citizens, they’re not British subjects.
If you think that the Queen wields no real power, then you probably haven’t heard of the Australian constitutional crisis of 1975, when the Governor General dismissed federal parliament on the Queen’s authority.
The Governor of the Australian state of New South Wales also dismissed parliament in the Queen’s name in 1932.
In both cases the government had the confidence of the lower house (a fancy way of saying they had effective control of the house).
Arrgh.. that should be “in the King’s name” for the 1932 dismissal.
OTOH if you think the queen wields real power, then you have to remember that Eddie 8 was basically told to fuck off by the prime minister and cabinet of the time, and further by the heads of the commonwealth countries at the time. He did so rather than brazen it out.
(We do of course have a history of various monarchs over the last 1000 years being ejected by a variety of means from the polite to the absolute.)
prl @12:
The Queen had nothing to do with it*. Even if Australia had abolished the monarchy before this, but maintained the structure it has (with two houses and a President with the same powers as the GG), the crisis could have unfolded in exactly the same way.
*She could have had something to do with it, if Whitlam had asked her to remove Kerr in time.
[OT]
The Queen is above all that. Always has had plausible deniability.
cf. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-07-14/what-palace-letters-say-about-queen-role-in-whitlam-dismissal/12454430
🙂
Time and time again, those that believe the Queen has actual power point to the Whitlam incident, -- the Australian Governor General dismissing PM Whitlam -- without realising that the event was a matter of local politicians. The GG had been appointed by the previous administration and was decidedly on their side of politics, so he took the slightest opportunity to return a solid to the party that appointed him, by dismissing the leadership of the party that replaced them.
Also overlooked is the time when the monarch and the Australian PM disagreed as to the choice of GG because the selected person was Australian and not British*, and the monarch was told in no uncertain terms that he had no choice but to accede to the “advice” (read: instruction) of the Australian PM. The monarchic power over the selection in prior years had been reduced to a purely ceremonial role in the selection, appointing whoever the antipodeans wanted. That was in 1930 by the way, and a year later it was made formal and explicit: the monarch of Australia was a position with powers granted to it by Australian law and constitution, and was not the monarch of the UK -- even if the person filling those roles was the same person. Henceforth the GG has been a matter of Australian law and powers, rather than British, though several more Brits were selected.
(Also of note is that every (or just most? not certain) other commonwealth nation followed suit after Australia set this precedent.)
Those that cling to the idea of monarchic power over locally elected leadership seem to have been taken in by the formal language of such processes. Various sources will state that the PM ‘advises’ or ‘recommends’ someone to the monarch of Australia (again, not the monarch of the UK), as if to suggest that the PM’s choice has the power of a gentle breeze, when really it has been an imperative for close to a century. This is why I referenced the ‘kissing hands’ audiences of British elections, which also has language suggestive of the monarch exerting power, when the reality is that the election is binding.
*I’m sure it is pure coincidence that the man’s name was Isaac Isaacs. No source I’ve found has claimed that being jewish played a role in the objection, but I have my suspicions.
Holms @17:
No, Kerr was chosen by Whitlam.
https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/kerr-sir-john-robert-23431
Huh, there I was thinking the entire thing was neatly explained by cronyism.
Canada, of course, is in a similar situation to Australia with regards to the Governor-General. In fact, it was pretty much the King-Byng Affair of 1926 that came to define the more modern role of the Governor-General in most Commonsealth countries via the Statute of Westminster in 1931, before either of the two Australian examples above. This included having the Governor-General appointed locally rather than by the monarch directly.
(Byng was English, and had served as an officer with Canadian troops at Vimy Ridge during WWI, which was part of why he had been selected as Governor-General to start with.)
Holms:
Sir Isaac Isaacs’ Wikipedia page suggests that the main reason for local Australian public objections to him being made Governor General, was, strangely, that he was Australian, rather than British. I wouldn’t be surprised if antisemitism also played a part. Australia in the 1930s was quite sectarian.
Isaac Issacs became the first Australian-born Australian Governor-General. He had previously been Chief Justice of the High Court. However, Britons continued to be appointed as Australian Governors-General after his term, and the last British-born Governor-General was William Sidney, 1st Viscount De L’Isle, whose term was as recent as 1961-65.
And yet, the Australian Governor-General, in consultation with the monarch and with the Chief Justice of the High Court (who was indeed an appointee of a previous Liberal/National Party government), and not in consultation with the Labor Prime Minister, dismissed an Australian government that still had the confidence of the House of Representatives, and then, on the advice of the newly-appointed Prime Minister who did not command a lower-house majority, dismissed parliament before it could pass a vote of no confidence in the new government.
Whether something like that could happen in the UK is another matter. Things went rather badly for the last British monarch who tried to rule without the consent of parliament.
Because the Australian PM of the day chose those people, and the monarchy had no choice but to go along with it. Which makes them poor examples of monarchic power over Australia.
No, the queen was not consulted.
Perhaps “consulted” was too strong, however, the Palace Letters indicate that she was kept aware of Kerr’s intentions, including the fact that Governor-General Kerr was withholding information about his intentions from PM Whitlam.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_letters