A message to the US from the Queen...

[Owain]

Yes, we have kettles, but most of us prefer real coffee to the instant kind you need a kettle for.

American coffee is renowned worldwide.

[david@london]

And no, I'm not fond of the queen myself, I'm a northerner, if something serves no purpose, it's no good to me...

.............president blair ? president cameron? ........ as yr head of state? keeping these undesirables away from the highest office is a purpose in itself.

[twocvbloke]

.............president blair ? president cameron? ........ as yr head of state? keeping these undesirables away from the highest office is a purpose in itself.

I didn't vote for either of those, though with the farce that was the last election, I wish I voted for the Monster Raving Loony Party, rather than the LibDems....

[Tom B]

Without invoking the political debate to any great degree, I wish you had too.

[twocvbloke]

hehe, a lot of people wish they voted MRL too...

[JorgeAmely]

Pas besoin d'une reine ici. Très vite, il se sentira comme nous vivons tous en France. Vive la France.  

[twocvbloke]

I guess I'd be okay, so long as I had a 2CV to pootle round in...

[George Knighton]

And why, oh why do the Brits drive on the wrong side of the street?  Seems rather dangerous to me.

The honest answer?  It's the exact opposite of why in North America we decided to drive on the right.

In the British Isles, you rode on the left in order to be able to more easily bring your arms to bear to challenge someone riding against you, someone who obviously wasn't supposed to be where he was.  At the time this custom developed, only knights of the shire would bear those kinds of arms and be likely to be on a horse, so it was appropriate to assume that somebody on a horse riding toward you ought to have been challenged.

At the time that America, including Canada, was settled, it was much later in our history and it was at a time that everybody was armed.  Arms were cheaper and were required for frontier defence and for hunting.  More people also had horses, since it was the 1700's instead of the 1100's.  :-)  So you decided to ride on the other side to make it both safer and more convenient.  Your side arm would be on your right, usually.  Your long arm would be either cradled with the barrel already pointing to the left, or it would be saddled on the right, out of reach of someone making a grab.

I'd have to type several more paragraphs to make it crystal clear, but, believe me, it made sense in the 1700's to be on the other side of the road in the wilderness that was America.

And finally the queen herself.  You folks love her, I am sure.  In fact many over on this side of the pond seem to have an infatuation with watching the royals get married and carry on with riddiculous looking hats and all the pomp.  I kind of liked it when she parachuted out of a helicopter at the opening of the olympics.  Jolly good show!  But having her as a ruler?  Nahhh.

There is an almost complete misunderstanding in the United States about how the British constitution works.  Because of a modern trend to promote the visibility of Parliamentary democracy, you will notice a trend even in the monarchies like the UK and Canada to not thoroughly understand the monarchy's machinery and how important it is.

Canada made an attempt through the propagation among its civil service of the tome titled "The Invisible Crown," which attempts to illustrate and re-enforce among the Canadian civil service the importance of the Crown in the machinery of government and in everyday civil life.

At the very root essence of the constitutional principle, we view monarchy as more or less the ultimate democracy.  It's just a roll of the dice who is the monarch.  The Queen knows this.  She knows she's not the smartest person in the world or the most educated person in the world.  She makes an active attempt to be concerned about anything that is brought to her personal attention, and she makes an effort to learn as much as possible about what is going on.

The *modern* principle of the monarchy is that the Queen is the twentieth and twenty-first century equivalent of the Tribune of the People.  When the crown is off her head, when she's just running around doing her everyday job, you see that she is just a regular, everyday person with a regular, everyday person's intelligence, and a regular, everyday person's concern for her country (or countries).

The monarchy's power is that this one little everyday person is fully and completely capable, on behalf of the rest of us with no voice at all, bring the machinery of government grinding to a halt at any time in order to focus attention on something.

If you've ever watched how the Lords Commissioners work (and I know most of you wouldn't even know who they are), you'll have a good idea of how directly the people are involved in the signification of the Assent.  It's a working meeting.  There's a table with the commissioners around it, and the Queen at the other end of it.  Everybody's standing up, everybody's in regular street clothes.  They describe to the Queen what's in a particular packet and she, having already scanned it, says, simply, "Approved."

But she doesn't absolutely *have* to say that.  There are times she has said ahead of a meeting that she has found errors.  If you cannot stand up in the House of Lords and say in the Norman French, La Reyne le veult, then the Bill remains in Parliament in stasis until people figure out what's wrong. 

It is the people's ultimate, last ditch defence of liberty that it is they who control the Assent, and that every military and political authority in the nation(s) are sworn to obey the people through the monarch, if it comes to it.

Every Emergency Powers Act, every constitutional document in the realms of the Commonwealth contain a phrase that sounds like this:

The Supreme Executive and military authority in and of this Commonwealth is and shall continue to be vested in the body of Her Majesty the Queen....

Even the controversial British Act, the Civil Contingencies Act, makes it clear that the government must go to the Queen to get a specific authority to enact an emergency in a locality.  You cannot abridge the liberty of the subject, a government cannot take away civil rights unless the people understand it...and they "understand" it through their final arbiter, the monarch.

It is a very difficult concept for people raised in a federal republic to understand.

But to most of the English speaking world, the monarch is the guarantor and ultimate arbiter of liberty.

The Queen does not rule.  But she's your ultimate spokesman, and she's there when you need her.

Even PM's as powerful as Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair have been dragged in to explain in person some controversial measure that was of questionable constitutional foundation.  In the case of Mrs Thatcher, her Tory Crime Bill had to be substantially improved and modified before it could be submitted for the Assent.  In Mr Blair's case, the government had to modify how the courts system and the new high court would be appointed without governmental interference.

It works.

It might be hard for US citizens to understand...but it works.  And it's very free and democratic.

[david@london]

news tonight.............elizabeth 2 slams 'lax' bankers for financial crisis.

[Owain]

If only one could snaffle one of those, one could have new plumbing in one's palace.

[twocvbloke]

I wonder how many phones one of those gold bars could buy.........

[old_stuff_hound]

I wonder how many phones one of those gold bars could buy.........

I'll bet that gold is worth its weight in phones.

[George Knighton]

news tonight.............elizabeth 2 slams 'lax' bankers for financial crisis.

The City isn't as on top of things as it used to be.  I'm not sure you're old enough to remember, but the City lost control during one of Lord Wilson's government as well.

Letting the Queen say something publicly during the Bank of England visit was a safe bet, and is only a mere reflection of what she has said to successive Prime Ministers on the subject.

It's probably safe to say that this was a "mere reflection" of much stronger language that she used behind closed doors.

Having devoted her entire life to her particular idea of what duty entails, she has a problem when other people do not seem to exercise appropriately a duty that is not as life involving as her own.

[Owain]

I wonder how many phones one of those gold bars could buy.........

Her Majesty is actually a something of a telephone collector - she has a telephone that was presented to one of the King Georges (1930s?) I think and in the 1980s when the Palace had a new Monarch (how apt!) switchboard installed, the telephone was modified internally to work with the new switchboard upon her insistence. I don't know but I think it might be one of the gold plated 232s.

It was a special installation because of the large number of manual extensions required, Her Maj does not dial 0 for PBX Operator, and the operators need to see the identity of the calling extension immediately.

[George Knighton]

And, you know, I cannot help saying it:  Who else on the face of this planet can seem so completely, utterly unimpressed by a wall of gold bricks?

LOL....