Originally posted by AmauroteWhy is the dictionary confused?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_prerogative
It looks like the dictionary is confused, too...
While I sympathize with your general detestation of the British monarchy and monarchy in general, you might want to reflect that the Gough Whitlam episode you cite occurred without the intervention of the monarch, and that government in general in Canada, A ...[text shortened]... ore basing their admirable and correct opposition to monarchy on the shakiest grounds available.
The royal prerogative is a body of customary authority, privilege, and immunity, recognized in common law and, sometimes, in civil law jurisdictions possessing a monarchy, as belonging to the sovereign alone.Seems clear enough to me.
Section 61 of the Constitution provides that 'The executive power of the Commonwealth is vested in the Queen and is exercisable by the Governor‑General as the Queen’s representative, and extends to the execution and maintenance of this Constitution, and of the laws of the Commonwealth'. Section 2 of the Australian Constitution provides that a Governor-General shall represent the Queen in Australia. In practice, the Governor-General carries out all the functions usually performed by a head of state, without reference to the Queen.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_Australia#Head_of_state
What we have as a system of government is a monarchy. A range of extremely significant powers and responsibilities derive from the constitutional status of the monarch and they undermine our democratic credentials. The practical functions of the queen may appear comparable to a fairy atop the Christmas tree, but one struggles to retain a monarchy in her absence.
Take one example. Since our army fights for the queen and not for the government of the day (something of which Thatcher was insufficiently aware) we can blanket their depredations with a mystical blanket of patriotism but in reality most wars are sordid, vicious affairs fought for commercial ends. The queen, in short, serves a vitally important role in the configuration of our electoral dictatorship. In her absence, far more critical questions could begin to be discussed in an adult manner.
Take another example. Britain's collection of offshore tax havens have a confusing constitutional status since they are governed by the crown outside the normal remit of democratic, parliamentary scrutiny. If we ceased to be a monarchy, maybe people would ask for a more coherent explanation of their status and the reason why the British government fails to curtail their criminal activities.
25 Dec 14
Originally posted by finneganI wonder if this is not just further evidence of the insatiable appetite of leftists to spend other people's money. "Criminal activities" equals keeping more of your own money than is approved of by leftists.
If we ceased to be a monarchy, maybe people would ask for a more coherent explanation of their status and the reason why the British government fails to curtail their criminal activities.
25 Dec 14
Originally posted by normbenignYou will find plenty of evidence that tax havens conceal and launder the proceeds of corruption and crime as well as assisting illegal tax evasion and illegal evasion of regulatory controls.
I wonder if this is not just further evidence of the insatiable appetite of leftists to spend other people's money. "Criminal activities" equals keeping more of your own money than is approved of by leftists.
25 Dec 14
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Tax havens are the centre pieces of a shadow financial system that enables users to escape regulations and tax laws in their own countries. These jurisdictions typically offer minimal regulation; little or no taxation on income or capital of non-residents; legally-enforced secrecy; non-disclosure of beneficial ownership of offshore corporations, trusts and foundations; and no effective exchange of information with other countries. As John Christensen notes in his essay, The Hidden Trillions: Secrecy, corruption and the offshore interface, these characteristics make such jurisdictions susceptible to a wide range of criminal and corrupt practices.http://www.halifaxinitiative.org/content/trouble-tax-havens-whose-haven-whose-storm
The New York gangster Meyer Lansky is widely acknowledged as the architect of offshore money laundering. In his lifetime, Lansky was one of the most powerful crime figures in the United States and the inspiration for the Hyman Roth character in the film The Godfather. Associates said that Lansky possessed a formidable intellect and an exceptional mastery of numbers. Despite determined efforts by U.S. authorities to build a criminal case against him, Lansky spent little time in jail and after a long and rewarding career retired to a comfortable home in suburban Florida.
Lansky and his partners were underworld entrepreneurs. During the Prohibition era, they sold bootleg liquor, organized a truck rental company, established bottling plants, and hijacked goods smuggled by other gangs. They even ran an efficient maritime shipping business to transport high quality Scotch across the Atlantic. [4]
Anxious to avoid the fate of Al Capone, Lansky had made his first foray into Swiss banking in the early 1930s, initially with the Exchange and Investment Bank of Geneva and later with the equally shady International Credit Bank of Switzerland. Lansky pioneered the ‘loan-back” technique. Money would be moved in the form of cash, traveller’s cheques, or bearer bonds for deposit in numbered Swiss accounts. The money then returned home in the form of “loans” to the person who had initiated the cycle who would repay the loan with interest, deducting the interest from his taxable income as a business expense.[5] A variant of this scheme is still used today by multinational corporations to reduce their tax obligations.
25 Dec 14
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As early as 1937, U.S. officials expressed alarm that wealthy Americans were evading taxes by establishing personal holding companies in the British colonies of the Bahamas and Newfoundland.[8] As the Mob developed their activities in the Bahamas, some British officials expressed concern that the offshore industry would bring renewed protests from the U.S. government. The British authorities, however, did nothing. When Lynden Pindling was elected as Premier in 1967 on a platform hostile to gambling and corruption, large parts of the offshore industry moved to the nearby Cayman Islands, a British Overseas Territory. Within a few months, money began to pour into Grand Cayman.[9] The first foreign bank to set up shop was Barclays of the United Kingdom, followed by the Royal Bank of Canada, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and the Bank of Nova Scotia Trust Company.[10] Despite warnings from officials, the British government again did nothing and allowed the Cayman Islands to develop into one of the world’s most notorious sinks for corrupt money.Excellent history of tax havens at this link. Worth a read, if like norm with a little n you imagine this is about nice people keeping their own money away from nasty guvmints.
There are several explanations for the British government’s reluctance to prohibit the development of secrecy jurisdictions in its own territories. By the 1950s and 1960s, the British Empire was collapsing and along with it the wealth that had sustained Britain for centuries. Many colonists and business people in the newly independent countries wanted to take their money out and needed clandestine means to do so.[11] Nicholas Shaxson also suggests that British interests were determined to preserve London’s dominant role in international finance and set out to build a “London-centered web of half-British territories...that would catch financial business from nearby jurisdictions by offering lightly taxed, lightly regulated and secretive bolt holes for money.”[12]
The offshore system proliferated in the late 1950s with the development of the London-based Euromarket which resulted in the liberalization of capital movements and unregulated loan markets. Shaxson notes that the City of London transformed itself into an “offshore island,” servicing businesses that were elsewhere. The market rippled outwards, initially to the Channel Island havens, and then the Caribbean secrecy jurisdictions which became Euromarket booking centres, “secretive and semi-fictional way stations...where the world’s wealthiest individuals and corporations, especially banks, could park their money, tax free and in secrecy...”
25 Dec 14
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Half of all international bank lending and at least half of all global trade on paper is conducted through secrecy jurisdictions, enabling multinational corporations to allocate profits in low-tax jurisdictions and costs to high tax jurisdictions. Secrecy jurisdictions host more than two million “international business corporations,” usually little more than shell companies with a postal address. The British Virgin Islands, with a population of 25,000, hosts an estimated 460,000 business corporations.[20] One modest building in the Cayman Islands is home to more that 18,000 of these entities. Before being exposed as a spectacular fraud, Enron had more than 6,500 shell companies, 600 of which were registered in the Cayman Islands. A December 2008 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office revealed that 83 of the 100 largest publicly-traded companies in the U.S., including big banks receiving bail-out money, have scores of offshore subsidiaries.
01 Jan 15
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Originally posted by finneganI've emboldened the operative word here to emphasize my original point. To re-emphasize this, please see below:
Why is the dictionary confused?The royal prerogative is a body of customary authority, privilege, and immunity, recognized in common law and, sometimes, in civil law jurisdictions possessing a monarchy, as belonging to the sovereign alone.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4267761.stm
Q: What are Royal Prerogatives?
A series of historic powers officially held by the Queen that have, in reality, been passed to politicians.
All politicians love power, and nothing quite so much as unaccountable power. On the Gough Whitlam example you cite, once again, that power was exercised by the appointee of the Australian Prime Minister - in other words, the appointee of a democratically elected Member of Parliament to an indirectly elected office. He himself had the power not only to appoint, but to remove his own de facto Head of State. To say the affair is squalid is accurate, and to say that Australia, Canada and New Zealand would be better off as republics without a parasite monarch is also accurate, but to pretend that the monarch has power she does not is to make a debate about facts no-one in those countries questions: the reason the monarchy is so despised is that it is without function or power, and the influence it exercises is the ability to fill a few red-tops with inadvertently comic flummery and the occasional bout of racism or class war. Replacing a comic-opera monarch with a comic-opera presidency hasn't prevented Ireland from creating its own "competitive tax regime" (i.e. turning itself into a vast corporate tax haven) or the Taoiseach grabbing more and more power. Irish presidential elections are fundamentally silly because impressive politicians like Mary Robinson aside, the real politics has moved to the Taoiseach - it would make much more sense to abolish the office entirely and focus on the Dail. This is what happens when you replace one null office with another null office: the jokes are just as stale, and the office just as void and pointless, but imagine the fuss you'd have justifying abolishing the office of a pointless president, as opposed to a pointless monarch. In newspaper terms, it's the difference between pointing out that the Emperor has no clothes to denouncing electoral democracy, even if what that electoral democracy produces is the political equivalent of the winner of an ugliest baby contest.
We've moved past leader worship, and there is no need for a mystical Head of State who "does" things and mysteriously holds it all together - either you have a real President, like the French and the Americans, or you don't bother with one at all. Anything that has no function should be abolished on principle, not replaced with something equally bogus plus the imprimatur of an electoral circus.
01 Jan 15
You just insist on a pointless word play.
The Queen personally may operate as a very nice housekeeper for Windsor Castle and hostess for garden parties. That is incidental to the fact that there are a range of important powers that are withheld from Parliament and held in her name. The notion of elective dictatorship captures the reality that an elected prime minister gets to play with such powers free from proper scrutiny, control or accountability.
Lots of English monarchs have been personally weak or allowed their ministers excessive freedom, but it was always the power of the monarch that was exercised by those ministers. Even in today's constitution, the Queen is not a nullity. She is essential to the fictions that mask the true exercise of power and there is always a slight risk of a future monarch getting more inclined than she is to test out the scope of the role.
Originally posted by finneganOh, cobblers. You can hide behind meaningless inkjet phrases like "essential to the configuration of dictatorship" all you like, but the powers don't belong to the monarch, whatever their origin, as you've just again inadvertently acknowledged - contrary to your original position. You also haven't explained why we need to get rid of the monarch to remove abuses that exist in bourgeois republics the world over, and powers that don't belong to her in the first place.
You just insist on a pointless word play.
The Queen personally may operate as a very nice housekeeper for Windsor Castle and hostess for garden parties. That is incidental to the fact that there are a range of important powers that are withheld from Parliament and held in her name. The notion of elective dictatorship captures the reality that an electe ...[text shortened]... ht risk of a future monarch getting more inclined than she is to test out the scope of the role.
As for "elective dictatorship", that concept is illustrative of bourgeois democracy in general, not monarchy in particular, and was coined ironically by a rancid Tory peer in the 1960s - to denounce what he saw as socialist tyranny. I'd be a bit warier quoting the Devil to bolster your manifesto for the New Jerusalem if I were you.
01 Jan 15
Originally posted by AmauroteFine. So by your account getting rid of the Queen will change nothing. I disagree.
Oh, cobblers. You can hide behind meaningless inkjet phrases like "essential to the configuration of dictatorship" all you like, but the powers don't belong to the monarch, whatever their origin, as you've just again inadvertently acknowledged - contrary to your original position. You also haven't explained why we need to get rid of the monarch to remove ab ...[text shortened]... be a bit warier quoting the Devil to bolster your manifesto for the New Jerusalem if I were you.
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01 Jan 15
Originally posted by finneganHe didn't say that. He said it wouldn't make things better.
Fine. So by your account getting rid of the Queen will change nothing. I disagree.
And in my estimation, at any rate, replacing the monarchy with a politically-motivated head of state would, in fact, make things worse, not better. Can you say: "President Boris"? *shudder*
01 Jan 15
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Originally posted by Shallow BlueI think the Queen is not benign and not a nullity but in fact a significant obstacle to open, accountable, democratic government. I do not think she is the only obstacle or that her removal would, in itself, open up a democratic and accountable constitution.
He didn't say that. He said it wouldn't make things better.
And in my estimation, at any rate, replacing the monarchy with a politically-motivated head of state would, in fact, make things worse, not better. Can you say: "President Boris"? *shudder*
You could, I suppose, take the line adopted by the excellent Edmund Burke, who thought the British constitution should be preserved rather than enter the madness of revolutionary change. However, he was reduced to fury by the inability of the aristocracy to respect the ideal role he envisaged for them in the great melody. The desire to preserve the monarchy as a refuge against change is not so persuasive today because the alternative is not terror and revolution and it need not be Boris Johnson.
Ireland has produced some very impressive and enlightened choices as president from a smaller population than Britain has to hand. If you think the British would elect Boris Johnson as president, then you have a particular and very unflattering view of the British people. However I think there is too much confusion between what the people think and what the red top newspapers want them to think. Mind you, I feel safer saying this following Scotland's vote to retain its beneficial contribution to the common good in Britain. Without them, things were looking bleak.
06 Jan 15
Originally posted by AThousandYoungThere are three, and soon four, people ahead of him in the order of succession, so it would require a complete tragedy for that to happen. Besides, for all we know he might make a good king (c.f. Shakespeare's portrayal of Henry V).
The idea of Harry on the throne gives me nightmares.
Just a point about prerogative. During the Protectorship, because Cromwell was not a king he had no prerogative, including the prerogative of mercy. This meant that everyone who was sentenced to death was executed, and since they still had drawing and quartering the sentence couldn't be reduced to a less awful death.
One of the difficulties for me with a Presidential system is that one ends up swearing allegiance to an abstraction. I'm rather more comfortable with the concept of swearing allegiance to a person, although since I've never been a member of the military or parliament and am a natural born subject I've never been called on to swear allegiance to the Queen. Swearing allegiance to a President does undermine the point of having a president and swearing allegiance to the office is rather odd.
06 Jan 15
Originally posted by finneganI have no illusions that criminal enterprises take advantage of tax havens as do everyday people. I once considered relocating to the Bahamas to avoid income taxes. Let's face it, nobody I know enjoys paying taxes, and everyone tries to legally minimize what they have to pay. SCOTUS has ruled that criminal enterprises have no duty to report illegal income due to Constitutional protection against self incrimination.
You will find plenty of evidence that tax havens conceal and launder the proceeds of corruption and crime as well as assisting illegal tax evasion and illegal evasion of regulatory controls.
So many things are legislated (for and against), that some have said that remaining purely legal is almost impossible. People routinely break laws they had no idea existed, or should exist.