Watching the spectacular of the Royal wedding, this Blog was reminded, once again, of the flexible and at times imprecise nature of our unwritten constitution. For example the foreign office intervened to have the Libyan ambassador’s invitation withdrawn, but Downing Street washed its hands of the Brown\/Blair snub on the grounds that it had nothing to do with the guest list.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Within the Nation State which is the United Kingdom, there are actually four states. There is the Ecclesiastical State of the Church of England, the Legal State of the judges and courts, the Political State of a part\u00a0democratic\u00a0parliament and the Royal State of the Monarchy. The\u00a0Queen is the titular head of all four, whilst exercising actual, as opposed to delegated, power only in her own state of the monarchy itself. Yet the monarchy is the foundation and the core of everything; all power and authority\u00a0flows from it and without it everything else implodes. Parliament has a lot less authority than it thinks. Without the expenditure of money it does not even have to be consulted. It does not even decide on the Government. That is the Monarch’s territory. By convention it does supply the personnel and\u00a0 holds\u00a0them to account. Nevertheless, as previously posted, no monarch who challenges\u00a0\u00a0parliament\u00a0will remain on the throne.<\/p>\n
It is small wonder that nobody has set all this down in writing. It is like a web. Some people are considered experts in the matter of our Constitution, but in truth they only understand bits of it. Nobody understands all of it because nobody knows what all of it actually is.\u00a0This is further complicated by the fact that within these four states there are actually four countries, England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Each is organised by a variation of that which applies in England.<\/p>\n
It is therefore understandable that faced with the opportunity to make a very small change in how it all works, AV voting, if opinion polls are to be believed, the people will decide to leave well alone and vote NO. The fact that this\u00a0sustains the most limited and unrepresentative democratic structure in the whole of the free world, is not only no cause for concern, it is a source of pride.\u00a0This reminds of\u00a0a plan to tidy the attic,\u00a0which, on peering into its\u00a0dusty and disordered chaos, is abandoned as too big a project for the day. And anyway who knows what priceless treasures rest out of harms way within? Best, perhaps,\u00a0to leave it all undisturbed.<\/p>\n
As\u00a0 a global audience of two billion\u00a0saw last Friday, our disordered and confusing system operates with immaculate precision and unrivalled style and is held in\u00a0awe as well as envy by most of the rest of the world. That is treasure indeed. Votes do count, but not for everything and for what they do, one is enough.\u00a0Or so the NO camp would have us believe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Watching the spectacular of the Royal wedding, this Blog was reminded, once again, of the flexible and at times imprecise nature of our unwritten constitution. For example the foreign office intervened to have the Libyan ambassador’s invitation withdrawn, but Downing Street washed its hands of the Brown\/Blair snub on the grounds that it had nothing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-malcolm-blair-robinson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3533"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3533\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3542,"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3533\/revisions\/3542"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.malcolmblair-robinson.co.uk\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}