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Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: The Queen
« on: September 09, 2022, 08:22:35 AM »So the law says the monarchy controls the military but we assume in a conflict between the people and the crown that the military will ignore the law and side with the people.Actually, we don't need to assume anything. We have centuries of the monarch just letting Parliament get on with governing the country without interference, because starting a civil war that you are likely to lose for no reason is an absolutely insane idea.
You have to understand that this hypothetical of yours is comparable to the POTUS trying to pass an executive order declaring himself emperor for life. It is such an astoundingly absurd thing to do that, were it to receive even a modicum of support from anyone with the power to enforce it, the result would be a completely new regime and existing laws would be irrelevant anyway.
It seems to me that the system should be restructured so that the military is explicitly accountable to the people and not the crown as opposed to hoping they'll defy their oaths.The point of what I said isn't that the system ensures victory for parliamentarians in a civil war. It is that a civil war is so obviously undesirable to all involved that it wouldn't even be contemplated. You are proposing radical, untested alterations to a system that has been working well for centuries in order to deal with an apocalyptic hypothetical that is extremely unlikely to ever occur.
I think a better comparison would be Israel. They have a parliamentary system but without a monarchy. Would Israel be better off if they added a monarch into the mix?Israel has a non-executive president, which is functionally equivalent to a monarch in a democracy, so it is likely that nothing would change in the short term. In the long term, a non-executive president is far more likely to become an executive president than a constitutional monarch is to become an absolute monarch, so all else being equal, Israel would probably be more stable with a monarch. But there are so many more important factors than this at play that it's simply not worth contemplating a change in either direction.
Also a worst case scenario would be a monarch asserting their power in a tyranical way sort of like Mohammed bin Salman.Or Robert Mugabe?
Let me ask this a different way. If Queen Elizabeth had no defined powers over the UK would it have had any impact over her country?Yes, because the monarch exercising certain powers on the advice of the prime minister is an integral part of how the British political system works.
So you can fire them if you're unhapppy with their choices.That is not an answer to the question I asked, given the context. We have just established that you don't think every member of a government needs to be democratically elected. What is it about a head of state that means that person specifically needs to be able to be fired by popular vote, while others don't?
Practically speaking I suppose. The monarchy has had a very corgi focused agenda for quite some time. What if that changes? What then?You could ask the same question about any political system. If any system changed to be less democratic, then it would become less democratic.
If the monarchy somehow took a tyrannical turn and parliament stripped it of any authority would you oppose this?Of course not. If there is a problem to be solved, then we should solve the problem. My objection is to you claiming that we should solve a problem that doesn't exist.
And to the same point, what does the UK stand to gain by preserving the power of the monarchy?The monarchy has very little power, in practical (as opposed to hypothetical) terms. The institution of the monarchy is an insurance policy against an executive presidency, which is demonstrably less democratic than a constitutional monarchy.