David Bennett

Whither Now United Kingdom

There are twenty-eight constitutional monarchies worldwide, of which the United Kingdom is one.

It is often referred to as the British monarchy. To be accurate, it is the monarchy of the United Kingdom, the Crown Dependencies of Jersey, Guernsey, and the Isle of Man, and the British Overseas Territories. But the name doesn’t roll off the tongue as easily.

The powers of the monarch with regard to the conduct of Government are purely ceremonial. As of 8 September 2022, the Government is His Majesty’s Government. And my thoughts are with what Charles III must be feeling now that he has stepped into a role that is surely one of the most special, strange, and demanding.

The role of the monarch has steadily reduced since Magna Carta in 1215, and brought to an end with the beheading of Charles I in 1649. The republican Commonwealth of England lasted just a hair’s breadth of time – until 1660. But when the monarchy was restored it was not the same creature. With the Bill of Rights of 1689 it was made clear that the monarch did Parliament’s bidding and the role became ceremonial – a Constitutional monarchy.

As an example, when the monarch reads the speech of what his or her Parliament intended to do, the speech is prepared by the Government and the monarch does not utter a single word that is not already prepared.

But the monarch does have power. If the Parliament of MPs votes that it has no confidence in the Government, then the Government must resign and a General election must be held. If the Government refuses to go, the monarch has the power to dismiss it.

And the allegiance of the Armed Forces is to the Crown and not to the Government. In times of civil strife that can matter.

The bottom line is that save for when the Government and the people are at odds, the monarch’s only power is through the myth of the rightness of the pyramid of entitlement. Looking at the span of the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, that pyramid has taken some hard knocks. Few people look back at the colonial history of Britain with the same misty eyed view that was the general view in 1952 when she became Queen.

The real power of the monarchy is in how deeply the loss of the Queen will be felt over the coming days and weeks and months..

Charles promised that once King he would rein in on his views on controversial matters. But everything is political in this modern world – and Charles has strong views on the environment and food security.

If this were a country governed by a Government of good repute; if this was a time plenty and rising expectations, then Charles might feel constrained to keep quiet. But the Government and the last Prime Minister are seen by not a few as a bunch of inept charlatans or worse. Charles might well feel he can open his mouth.

A Personal Note On The Death Of Queen Elizabeth II

Tamara and I booked to see Much Ado About Nothing, being put on by the National Theatre and beamed to our local Picturehouse cinema. It was Tamara’s idea and I was happy to go along with it. I feared that the comedy would be insubstantial, but in fact it is much weightier than say ‘Taming Of The Shrew’ that we saw recently. And it was well acted and the set design was terrific.

Meanwhile, this afternoon, Queen Elizabeth II died.

Tamara and I were late to arrive at the cinema, and when we walked into Screen 1, everyone was silent, as were the audience at the National Theatre in London who were on the screen. We realised that someone at the London venue had asked for silence to acknowledge the passing of the Queen. Then the National Anthem was played and people in the cinema stood up. Tamara and I were standing already because we had just walked in, and we hadn’t yet gone to our seats.

Then a man at the London venue spoke and said that the show would go on. And we expected the show to begin more or less straight away. But that didn’t happen. Instead the curtain with the words Much Ado About Nothing filled the screen and there was no sound. And it just went on and on. It was eerie, as though it was echoing the breakdown in the smooth flow of things. So we all sat in silence, just watching this curtain remind us that is was Much Ado About Nothing.

I was thinking that after three million years of evolution we still do not know what death is, or at the absolute least one can say there is no consensus about what it is.

And I was thinking of the living. How will the country deal with the event? Britain is faced with the worst civil discontent for a generation. People talk openly about the cost of living crisis. If you know the British you know that they do not talk about money and how tight it is and how bad things are – not in public, between strangers. But they are doing now. It is not taboo. Rather, it has become a part of the public discourse. That’s how bad things are.

Post Office Workers, Royal Mail workers, Rail workers, Legal Aid barristers – they are all staging strikes for better pay and conditions.

We have a new Prime Minister who is there because the last one was kicked out.

The pound is at its lowest value in a generation.

So how will the country react to the death of the Queen? Will it draw people together or will it be one more event that leads to the break in the ties that keep civil society intact?

So here we are in the play, near the end. In a moment Claudio will find out that Hero, his beloved, is not dead and everything will end happily.

Except the link to the National Theatre broke at that moment, and the last we see before the screen goes blank, is Claudio’s hand open, waiting, frozen.

The audience sits, waiting to see whether the link can be restored (it cannot), and there is a strange and patient mood in the air, and behind it all, the death of Queen Elizabeth II.

The Last Prime Minister

I wrote the following in the few minutes before the next British Prime Minister Liz Truss was announced. The election of her to the role by Conservative Party members followed the ejection of Boris Johnson from the job for his unforced errors and disregard for the truth.

An unforced error is a mistake in play that is attributed to one’s own failure rather than to the skill or effort of one’s opponent. And there were several that resulted from Johnson’s disdain for what I believe he saw as petty rules. He was attractive to those who wanted a strong leader precisely because he was a buccaneer, treading where others more timid feared to tread. As in many things, qualities have a good and a bad side.

Prorogration

The first unforced error was that on 28 August 2019, the Parliament of the United Kingdom was ordered to be prorogued by Queen Elizabeth II upon the advice of the Conservative prime minister, Boris Johnson. Britain is a constitutional monarchy, meaning that the reigning monarch has little power, and ‘on the advice of’ is a particularly British way of saying the the prime minister ordered the Queen to prorogue Parliament.

A prorogation is the discontinuance of a session of Parliament without dissolving it. Johnson’s purpose in proroguing Parliament for an unusually extended period was to severely limit the time that the MPs in the House of Commons had to consider the Brexit Bill that was before it. 

Concerned citizens raised a legal challenge and the Supreme Court ruled that the prorogation was unlawful.

Had Johnson’s Government given even the slimmest of reasons for their action, then the Supreme Court would not have looked to the adequacy of the reason. But the Government gave no reason, and that allowed the court to conclude that the reason for such a lengthy discontinuance was simply to deny Parliament time to carry out its function, and that that was unlawful.

The statement by Johnson that I found most telling was when he said later of his accomplishments, “..we saw off Brenda Hale..” Brenda Hale was the president of the Supreme Court. First, he didn’t see off anyone. He was called on his flagrant trashing of the rules of prorogation. Second, it is boorish to call her by her name and not by her honorific. Third, he and she are part of the system of Government that rules this country, and to trash her personally is to prove his disdain for the laws and the system that hold the country together.

Owen Patterson MP

The second unforced error was to try to overturn the 30 day suspension of Owen Patterson MP after Kathryn Stone, the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards of the House of Commons, found him guilty of breaching the paid advocacy rules.

In October 2021 the Commissioner found that Owen Paterson had breached the paid advocacy rules for making three approaches to the Food Standards Agency and four approaches to the Department for International Development in relation to Randox and seven approaches to the Food Standards Agency relating to Lynn’s Country Foods.

The Commissioner said Paterson had “repeatedly used his privileged position to benefit two companies for whom he was a paid consultant, and that this has brought the house into disrepute” and that “no previous case of paid advocacy has seen so many breaches or such a clear pattern of behaviour in failing to separate private and public interests”.

Acting on her report, The Commons Select Committee on Standards recommended that Paterson be suspended from the Commons for 30 sitting days. The Government decided they didn’t like that and voted to overturn the suspension. The uproar that followed resulted in Own Paterson resigning as an MP.

Malicious Slander

The third unforced error was to maliciously slander the Leader of the Opposition Labour Party in the House of Commons.

Munira Mirza is a British political advisor who was the Director of the Number 10 Policy Unit under prime minister Boris Johnson, until she resigned today, 3 February 2022. She resigned because, as she described in her resignation letter, the Prime Minister Boris Johnson knowingly and maliciously slandered the leader of the Opposition with a false claim about his supposed failings when he was Director of Public Prosecutions.

Christopher Pincher MP

The final straw for the members of his Cabinet was when he promoted Christopher Pincher MP, knowing that Mr Pincher was subject to an investigation over sexual assault, and then lying to Parliament saying he was not aware of the allegations and the investigation.

Partygate

And I have not touched on Partygate and the breaches of the rules about meeting during COVID that his Government has laid down and which the population had followed, sometimes resulting in family members not being there to say goodbye to loved ones on their deathbed.

A Tale Of Two Courts: Roe v Wade and Prorogation

After the reversal of Roe v. Wade, the attorney general in the United States and the President of United States said the decision of the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade was wrong.

On 28 August 2019, the Parliament of the United Kingdom was ordered to be prorogued by Queen Elizabeth II upon the advice of the Conservative prime minister, Boris Johnson. Britain is a constitutional monarchy, meaning that the reigning monarch has little power, and ‘on the advice of’ is a particularly British way of saying the the prime minister ordered the Queen to prorogue Parliament.

A prorogation is the discontinue a session of Parliament without dissolving it. Johnson’s purpose in proroguing Parliament for an unusually extended period was to severely limit the time that the MPs in the House of Commons had to consider the Brexit Bill that was before it.

Concerned citizens raised a legal challenge and the Supreme Court ruled that the prorogation was unlawful.

Had Johnson’s Government given even the slimmest of reasons for their action, then the Supreme Court would not have looked to the adequacy of the reason. But the Government gave no reason, and that allowed the court to conclude that the reason for such a lengthy discontinuance was simply to deny Parliament time to carry out its function, and that that was unlawful.

Conservatives said the Supreme Court leaned too far to the Left, and was wrong to declare illegal the proroguing of parliament by the Conservative government.

If we start to say that one court is politicised and goes against the will of the people then where does it end?

Of course, some people would say – there are huge differences in the nature of the cases between in the USA and Britain.

Dig deeper, though, and the arguments are the same. The argument in the USA is that the Supreme Court has been packed with ultra-conservative judges with an avowed intention to come to conclusions other than the known general will of the people.

The argument in the UK is that the Supreme Court consists of members who are against the will of the people to ‘deliver Brexit’.

What is the same in both jurisdictions is that one of the foundational pillars of law is being attacked. There are routes to moving past unpopular decisions, but calling the court enemies of the will of the people is a dangerous road. It is a dangerous way to look at things because the will of the people is not a safe route to furthering the best in humanity anyway.