I have just been watching a recording of the ceremony of the proclamation of “The King” (as I suppose we shall now have to refer to him). I was expecting it to be slightly ridiculous, full of archaic flummery and twaddle. Indeed, there was quite a lot of that, but it actually had a serious purpose and brought home to me how some of our key constitutional principles are dependent on the monarchy. It is a warning that any attempt to replace the monarchy with a republic needs to be very carefully thought through.
What struck me particularly was the role of the Churches – both of England and of Scotland. The two English archbishops were part of the platform party, who had to witness the King’s declaration, which itself included several references to the independence of the Church of Scotland and the Presbyterian religion. It was also apparent that the union of Scotland with the rest of the UK is very much bound up with the monarchy.
In principle I am a republican, which implies replacing the monarch with an elected head of state or president, but before doing that it is important to establish what the role of the head of state should be. Essentially, it is a choice between
(a) Parliamentary democracy with a ceremonial head of state (whether monarch or president) – or
(b) a directly elected president with executive powers but accountable to an elected legislature which controls the budget (as in the United States).
It was the failure to sort out this choice that led to the failure of the Australian attempt some years ago to convert to a republic. Before the referendum in that country polls indicated support for the principle of a republic, but there was opposition to the idea of the president being indirectly elected by MPs rather than directly elected by popular vote. Consequently, the referendum was lost.
If the president is directly elected by popular vote, then it is inevitable that, whatever the constitution may say, he or she would acquire a personal mandate and political authority that would rival that of the legislature. Thus in the United States the role of the Congress is theoretically to check and balance the authority of the President, but in practice, if the same political party controls both the Congress and the White House, the President is able to drive through his/her agenda. If they are of different parties (or if the President lacks a sufficient working majority in Congress), the result is gridlock, with each side blaming the other for indecision and paralysis in government.
What this shows is that a directly elected president is incompatible with parliamentary democracy in which a prime minister is drawn from and responsible to the legislature. However, there is an exception to this rule that rather illustrates the difficulty. The peculiar constitution of the 5th French Republic, which was devised by De Gaulle in 1958 to express his style of government, is sometimes described as “semi-presidential”. In this constitution the president is popularly elected for a five year term (originally seven years) and shares executive power with the prime minister. The legislature enjoys exclusive competence in certain areas of government (primarily domestic) whereas the president has authority in areas that are not thus reserved as well as in foreign and defence policy. As the presidential and legislative elections used not to coincide, there have been occasions when the president has been obliged to appoint a prime minister from an opposition party (e.g. when President Mitterrand appointed Jacques Chirac), and the result has been an uneasy “cohabitation”.
So neither the American nor the French models are ones to admire or follow.
The alternative system - that is, parliamentary democracy combined with a purely ceremonial head of state - can be illustrated by a number of examples: Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands (amongst others). The first two of these well managed and successful countries are republics, and the third is a monarchy. In all of them, the government is wholly managed by a prime minister (variously called Chancellor or Taoiseach) responsible to the legislature, where he or she commands a majority. The role of the president or monarch is confined to appointing the prime minister and representing the state on formal occasions.
Is this a model that the UK could follow?
The royal prerogative
My primary objection to the current British monarchy is not the monarch himself or herself. Although I certainly think that having a hereditary king or queen is an anachronism in the 21st century, provided that he or she keeps out of politics, they are not a particular problem. Indeed, they have so much popular support and adulation in the UK that it would be politically impossible to replace them.
The real problem is the royal prerogative. This is how an eminent constitutional lawyer, Alex Carroll, described it in Constitutional and Administrative Law1 in 2007:
“The prerogative appears to be historically and as a matter of fact nothing else than the residue of discretionary or arbitrary authority which at any given time is legally left in the hands of the crown. The prerogative is the name of the remaining portion of the Crown's original authority ... Every act which the executive government can lawfully do without the authority of an Act of Parliament is done in virtue of the prerogative."
It is of course a fiction that these powers are exercised by
the monarch on the advice of ministers.
In practice they are powers delegated to ministers, who can then
exercise them arbitrarily without the consent of or even in defiance of Parliament
– as both Theresa May and Boris Johnson tried to do in the 2017 Parliament. In these two cases the Courts ruled that the
then Prime Minister had exceeded their authority. However, the option of legal
challenge is not available in the vast majority of cases.
Listed below are some of the powers that are theoretically still vested in the monarch but are exercised in practice by the Prime Minister or other Ministers with no Parliamentary scrutiny:
The powers to:-
Prorogue and summon Parliament (though not now to dissolve
it)
- Assent (or otherwise) to legislation
- Declare war
- Deploy the armed forces (the King being the Commander in Chief)
- Recognise foreign governments or make treaties with them
- Appoint ambassadors, permanent secretaries of departments, the heads of the security services, members of the Defence Staff, Royal Commissions and members of public bodies
- Create peers
- Appoint judges
- Appoint bishops
- Confer honours such as OBE or knighthoods (although some, such as Order of Merit, remain personal to the monarch)
- Grant pardons
- Restrain aliens from entering the UK
- Issue and withdraw passports
- Approve Royal Charters
(such as the BBC)
Some of these powers or functions are central to the functioning of a liberal democracy (which I would like to think we should enjoy), and it cannot be right that they should be exercised arbitrarily and unchallenged with no possibility of redress or supervision by Parliament.
What is required therefore - independently of whether we retain the monarchy or convert to a republic - is a constitutional settlement that brings these powers clearly within the competence of an elected Parliament. If that were to happen, I think I could live with the archaic flummery and twaddle that surrounds our present hereditary monarchy.
1Carroll, Alex (2007). Constitutional and Administrative Law (4th ed.). Pearson Longman. ISBN 978-1-4058-1231-3.
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