The Monarch Flashcards
What is the Monarch’s current role?
Some of the monarch’s remaining personal powers, limited by constitutional convention, are:
- Appointing the Prime Minister
- Dissolving Parliament in some circumstances
- Giving ‘Royal Assent’ to Acts of Parliament
The law-making power of Parliament is described as being vested in the ‘King-in-Parliament’.
What is the difference between absolute monarchy and constitutional monarchy?
Absolute monarchy: Supreme authority unrestricted by laws or customs.
Constitutional monarchy: Authority derives from and is limited by the constitution and the law.
What does ‘the Crown’ mean in criminal cases?
The names of modern judicial review cases are written like this: R (on the application of Smith) v The Secretary of State … and said like this: “the Crown on the application of …”
The ‘R’ stands for ‘Rex’ (the King)
In reality, criminal prosecutions are started by the Crown Prosecution Service. Although nominally in service of ‘the Crown’, the monarch himself has nothing to do with starting these proceedings.
Similarly, judicial review proceedings are brought in the name of the Crown, but in reality they are started by individuals. This reflects the fact that in a judicial review, the court is dealing with a public law matter, i.e. a legal problem that affects society beyond the interests of the individual.
You will also hear Judges referred to as “His Majesty’s judges”, although the King does not personally appoint them.
What is the Royal Prerogative?
The royal prerogative or ‘Crown prerogative’ refers to the powers that were historically vested in the monarch since the days of absolutist monarchy (pre-1688). They are not statutory powers and so have never been created or approved by Parliament. (You will look at this topic in more detail in your separate materials on the Royal Prerogative.)
It is a significant feature of the UK constitution that such powers still form part of the legal authority of the executive, even if they are no longer used in practice by the monarch on his own initiative. Today, they are still legitimate powers but are only exercised on the advice of the Prime Minister or other senior government ministers.
Some remaining prerogative powers include:
- Summoning, proroguing and dissolving Parliament
- Appointing and dismissing government ministers
- Mobilising the armed forces, including the declaration of war
- Negotiating treaties
Which case illustrates both the convention that the monarch acts only on the Prime Minister’s advice, and that the exercise of prerogative powers by the Executive is not immune from challenge in the courts?
Miller v the Prime Minister
In September 2019, in the wider context of the imminent departure of the UK from the European Union, Gina Miller and others brought a legal challenge to the advice given to the late Queen by Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, to prorogue Parliament.
As a result of the Prime Minister’s advice, the Queen prorogued Parliament for a period of five weeks. The Supreme Court decided that the Prime Minister’s advice was unlawful because it had the effect of:
“frustrating or preventing, without reasonable justification, the ability of Parliament to carry out its constitutional functions as a legislature and as the body responsible for the supervision of the executive […] This prolonged suspension of Parliamentary democracy took place in quite exceptional circumstances […] the effect upon the fundamentals of our democracy was extreme”.
