The Crown of Disenchantment
Over in Great Britain, the House of Commons recently passed the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill which, among other things, keeps the time limit on abortions at twenty-four weeks (in spite a hope that it would be lowered), authorizes the creation of “savior siblings (brothers and sisters deliberately created in a lab solely for their organs to be harvested for use by the already-born), and allows for the creation of animal-human hybrids. The British human rights activist James Mawdsley, famously jailed for over a year by the military junta in Burma, has asked opponents of the HFE Bill to sign a petition to Queen Elizabeth II imploring her to withhold the royal assent necessary for the Bill to become law.
Under the British constitution, a bill only becomes a law when it has received the assent of all three components of the British Parliament: the Commons, the Lords, and the Crown. The last time the Crown withheld consent was in 1708 when Queen Anne refused to sign the Scottish Militia Bill. Since that time, it has been an unspoken convention that should the Crown object to a piece of legislation, it should privately inform its ministers before the legislation is voted upon in order for it to be withdrawn, thus preventing the scandal of the Crown and the Commons appearing to be in disagreement. Despite this convention, however, the Crown still has the right to withhold consent, but merely neglects to exercise that right.
While the Crown has faded to near-irrelevance in the everyday workings of the British government, this was certainly not always the case, and the Crown has intervened in politics several times since Queen Anne’s refusal of assent in 1708. What follows are but a few twentieth-century examples.
In 1925, William Mackenzie King was Prime Minister of Canada with 99 Liberal MPs to the Conservative opposition’s 116. He was able to do this by forming a minority government with the support of the 24 MPs of the Progressive Party. A year later, Liberal MPs were implicated in a bribery scandal and so the Progressives having withdrawn their support for the minority government. As parliament debated a motion to censure the MPs involved, the Prime Minister asked Lord Byng, the Governor-General of Canada (and thus the direct representative of the Crown), to dissolve parliament and call a general election.
Lord Byng did not want it to appear that the Crown was allowing parliament to be dissolved in order to prevent the censure of government MPs and so used the royal prerogative and refused to call an election. The Conservatives, as the largest party in parliament (Lord Byng argued), should have a chance at forming a government instead. The Governor-General invited Arthur Meighen, leader of the Conservatives, to form a government instead, and Meighen agreed. This, in turn, infuriated not only the Liberals but also the Progressives, throwing the middle-man back into the Liberal camp. Meighen put his government up to a vote of confidence, lost it by one vote, and so resigned and asked the Governor-General to dissolve parliament and call an election, which Lord Byng duly did.
“I have to await the verdict of history to prove my having adopted a wrong course,” Lord Byng wrote, “and this I do with an easy conscience that, right or wrong, I have acted in the interests of Canada and implicated no one else in my decision.”
In 1931, when the Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald submitted his resignation to the King, George V took the unprecedented step of asking MacDonald to form a national government with the support of Conservatives and Liberal Members of Parliament. MacDonald lasted as Prime Minister until 1935, but Great Britain would not be governed by a single-party government again until 1945.
More recently, the Crown controversially intervened in Australian politics in 1975. Gough Whitlam’s Labor government commanded a majority in the House of Representatives but the opposition coalition of the Liberals and the National Country Party held sway in the Senate. It is traditional in Westminster-style systems that if a money supply bill fails to pass, the government falls with it. The Senate refused to vote on the annual Budget, in hopes of provoking Whitlam into calling a new election. Whitlam stubbornly refused, and the impasse grew as the weeks passed and, with no budget approved, it looked like the government of Australia would not be able to meet its financial obligations for the year.
Finally, the Governor-General of Australia, Sir John Kerr, used the royal prerogative to dismiss Whitlam as Prime Minister, asked the opposition leader Malcolm Fraser to take the job. Fraser formed a caretaker government solely to pass the appropriations bill then immediately called a new election which his own Liberal/National Country coalition won handily.
Such royal interventions, however, are not limited to the English-speaking world. Belgium’s King Baudouin I, a Charismatic Catholic and friend of Francisco Franco, famously refused to give assent to a bill liberalizing the kingdom’s abortion laws. The Prime Minister, Wilfred Martens, simply had the King declared temporarily unable to reign and the Government signed the Bill in place of the King (as is provided in the Belgian Constitution). Two days later, the Government declared the King able to reign once more, and all was back to normal (except for the unborn children killed thereafter, of course).
One of the great benefits of a monarchy is this: that the Crown act as a source of authority, free from democratic accountability, who is capable of blocking any egregious acts which the government of the day may attempt. The HFE Bill is the perfect example of a bill the Crown ought to reject, for the benefit of all the kingdom, most especially the unborn. Yet we can reasonably assume that Elizabeth II will grant her assent to this travesty of law nonetheless, as the current occupant of the throne has (ironically) so thoroughly and woefully imbibed the democratic spirit that she knows not how to fulfill her purpose and duty as Queen. (It is important to note that in neither the King-Byng affair nor the Whitlam-Kerr affair was the Governor General acting on the orders of the actual person who was the Crown at the time, but rather on their dutiful instinct as the local incarnation thereof). It is disappointing to those who are unflinching in their attempts to defend the British Monarchy that the British Monarchy insists on participating in, and sometimes urging on, the very sort of wickedness which we look to the Crown to protect us from. Alas, so far we have looked in vain.
Comments
What is the point of all this?
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This, I believe, is Andrew Cusack’s finest article yet.
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I add my agreement to that of R. J. Stove: I enjoyed Andrew Cusack’s article,
and think that it serves an important purpose. Just this week Nepal, via a
constituent assembly heavily made up of Maoists, voted to “dismiss” the centuries
old Nepalese monarchy, a move, I believe, that will come to haunt that nation (which
has absolutely no experience whatsoever in democratic government). For many monarchy
is seen as passe, a thing of the past. I disagree strongly; in the 20th and 21st
centuries it continues to serve as a unifier of a nation, a symbol of a nation’s
heritage, culture, and history. Traditionally, heirs apparent and presumptive receive
a battery of training and preparation, schooling and education, so that when they
assume the reigns of (whatever may be left of) power, they can exercise it with wisdom,
moderation, and justice. Certainly, in the past their have been “bad” monarchs---the
stories abound. But likely than not, most kings have been “good” and wise, and have led
their nations with mercy and common sense. Again, there have been “playboys” and wastrels
in the lot, but they are the exceptions, I think, that confirm the rule.
And republics? The record is not so clear, even in the USA. In the depths of every heart of
every true traditionalist there is a bit of sentiment for a king, for kingship, and for that
means for a nation. I say this as an “old republican” raised to admire Washington, Jefferson,
Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Robert Taft, but it remains true....
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@R. J. Stove:
I have enjoyed some of your writings on musical topics. Do you think there
might be a chance for you to pen something on Takimag?
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I’d like to thank Mr. Cusack for eloquently addressing an important topic and also Dr. Cathey for his excellent comments.
As I wrote at my blog, while Mr. Cusack makes good points, it remains my position that HM cannot and should not be blamed for consistently acting within the constraints of modern constitutional monarchy, according to which the sovereign is expected to automatically sign any bill passed by the legislature. We have seen in Europe and elsewhere what has happened to monarchs who have strayed outside the “democratic” box. It should also be noted that none of the modern examples of British or Commonwealth royal intervention cited by Mr. Cusack involved an attempted royal veto of any legislation approved by the elected government, and even King Baudouin’s defiant gesture on abortion was obviously not effective. While a relatively activist style of monarchy has been fairly successful in the Principality of Liechtenstein, the last European King who clashed with his government was Constantine II of Greece--now in exile for the past 40 years.
Traditionalists who long for a more active Crown should think of modern royalty as prisoners in a golden cage, in which case it is up to us to rescue them. We can start by trying to combat the false belief that only those who have won elections are entitled to have any real influence in government. But for the time being, that is the way Britain works, and it is the MPs who voted for this bill, and the ordinary people who voted for them, not the Queen, who should be held responsible for it. I doubt that even all of those opposed to the Bill would wish for it to be defeated via royal veto, so deeply ingrained is the democratic mindset even among “conservatives.”
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You nostalgic monarchists need to get a grip. The Crown has been defined by and served totally at the pleasure of Parliament for the last 320 years.
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@nbf: We do know that, and we don’t particularly like it.
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I’ve always fancied myself as a Jacobite ever since Kidnapped was read to me as a child. But to think, as Andrew Cusack apparently does, that the concept of royal assent is in any way realistic and relevant to the debate over the latest horror of genetic engineering is absurd.
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I am at least glad to see Andrew showing how a Constitutional Monarchy is workable, with the Monarch being a potential good branch of government to keep it in balance, checks, and divided. This shows yet again why an absolute Monarchy would be a disaster: One sinful man with total power could in theory have not allowed the extended abortion in the first place, but that also means he could have had the power to totally legalize it as well. Absolute Monarchy is a deadly two edged sword, and the British system of Monarchy and Parliament is a good example of a system that can work well (it of course is not perfect, as the example above with the recent law shows, but it does show that Republican systems like the USA are not at fault because of our Constitution, but because of men and events like Lincoln and the Civil War which bypassed it and distorted it. It should be our job (like Ron Paul) to drag it back to the place where it once was.
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Crisply written, fascinating piece, interesting not least in revealing Her Immajesty’s direct culpability in the charnel house Britain has become.
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I,for one, await implimentation of the Act. A house populated by animal-human hybrids will be a distinct improvement.
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On a point of fact, “it is important to note that in neither the King-Byng affair nor the Whitlam-Kerr affair was the Governor General acting on the orders of the actual person who was the Crown at the time” - is that known to be true, or simply a guess? As far as I was aware, any such communications between monarch and Governor-General would be private.
I cannot imagine such monumental uses of the Sovereign’s authority being made without so much as a telephone call. Admittedly, I doubt it was done on HM’s “instruction”: more likely her lack of informed objection.
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Is not the Queen of England also the head of the Church of England?
If so, then does she not have the obligation, from an ethical perspective, to oppose legislation that is contrary to dogma, morals or the natural law?
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Oh dear… a counter-post is required.
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