Talk:Royal Prerogative/2003-2006 archive

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This needs to be wikified and merged with Royal prerogative. Im not the person to do it, I know little about this phrase. Evercat 21:47 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Why the capitalization? I fail to see how this is a proper noun. --mav 22:14 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Heh, JT's total rewrite makes it clearer. :-) Evercat 23:48 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)

How does crown immunity from prosecution interact with the prosecution of Charles I for treason?

-- Roadrunner

Crown immunity means the immunity of the Crown as a governmental institution, not of the person wearing it, though the monarch now has personal immunity. But in any case, the monarchy, Crown etc were being all swept away by Cromwell so I presume the Royal Prerogative went with them and then came back in 1660. FearÉIREANN 01:08 25 Jul 2003 (UTC)


It the formal name of a formal power, thus is a proper noun and is capitalised. FearÉIREANN 23:52 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)


Hlavac| There are those who like legalistic surface explanations of ideas without delving deeper into the ideas underneath the surface. I suppose as a matter of national pride that a citizen of the United Kingdom would claim the "Royal Prerogative" as a wholly British idea, however, this is not so. It is a semantical argument only. Are you to argue that kings of any era did not exercise a "royal prerogative" because the Acts of the British Parliament didn't declare it so? Talk about a 'dodgy point of view' as you made reference to my own before stripping out the larger picture from the article.

Your 'larger' was full of factual inaccuracies, gross distortions and monumental over-simplifications. There was no 'bigger picture' in the article. There was simply gross inaccuracies. You seem not to understand that the Royal Prerogative means something specific; it does mean 'discuss prerogatives that have something to do with monarchs'. You made the same mistakes on the divine right of kings article, which means something very specific but which you seem to think means 'discuss the links between monarchs and religion and their belief in ther own divinity or authority.' This is an encyclopædia. Please apply encyclopædic standards of accurary and specificality. FearÉIREANN 00:39 26 Jul 2003 (UTC)

(The next comment refers to Hlavac's comment above. I couldn't fit my comment elsewhere as it also dealt with Hlavac's comments. FearÉIREANN 00:39 26 Jul 2003 (UTC))

That's very questionable. I don't see a Japanese equivalent to royal prerogative or really a Chinese equivalent.

It's great that you supplied a wonderful article on the English definition of the term. But the rest of the world's kings and leader have exercised the right, no matter what they have called it.

What then do we call this prerogative in other lands? What exactly did the kings of England prior to James 1 exercise? What other semantic devise do you prefer?

The Divine Right of Kings is no different in effect than a Royal Prerogative. In every sense of the word "prerogative" is the right to made decisions without question. If a man is "king of his castle," that is, his own home, then within it he exercises his own "royal prerogative."

The problem is that you are missing the fact that monarchies often work very differently. The Chinese emperor was under different constraints and working under different royal theory than an English king. I've found that mixing terminology really confuses things. Roadrunner
The divine right of Kings is a totally different concept to royal prerogative. Divine right is associated with absolutist monarchies - the King is the law. In the English system the monarch became constrained by the common law. The prerogative covered areas not covered by the common law and therefore not justiciable. The English revolution at root was about the Stuart monarchs attempting to rule outside of the law. The boundaries of the prerogative has always caused anomalies - the King can go to war without consulting anyone but to pay for the war he needs Parliament to approve it.

Is the power of the monarch to refuse assent to acts of parliament part of the royal prerogative, or is that distinct? john 22:57 25 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I think it is part of the Royal Prerogative but I'm not 100% sure. FearÉIREANN 00:39 26 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I reverted the following inaccurate addition.

So in practice the monarch does not have widespread powers, and all government decisons are made by the government. Observers outside the United Kingdom sometimes imagine the Queen actually has extraordinary un-democratic powers, but in reality she is just as constrained as the president of a republic. The elected parliament is supreme.

1. The monarch does have very widespread powers.

2. All government decisions are made by the Government - that is convention. It isn't written down anywhere. The Queen could dismiss Tony Blair tomorrow, ask Ian Paisley to form a government (which requires no vote of Parliament), prorogue parliament, declare war on the United States, order every French person to leave the UK, etc. Hundreds of years of conventions tell her not to, and it would be an act of suicide for the monarchy, but these powers do exist. Conventions are, as they, say, not worth the paper they are written on (ie, they aren't written anywhere). In addition, a Paisley government would be unable to function, as it could not gain supply.

3. She is just as constrained as the president of a republic. Not so. Presidents in democratic republics live under strict legally enforceable restrictions in written constitutions. The Queen doesn't.

4.The Elected parliament is sovereign. Wrong. Parliament is sovereign in those areas where parliament chooses to be sovereign. Royal prerogatives exist outside the control of parliament and parliament has chosen never to take control of them, which it could do easily through statute law. That is the whole controversial thing about them.

BTW I'm not having a pop at the Queen or the British system. The system works well and I admire aspects of it. But it is a system held together by gentlemen's agreements not to break convention. But any convention could be broken; Thatcher broke quite a few. FearÉIREANN 00:39 26 Jul 2003 (UTC)


User:Hlavac moved this article to a made-up name of European Royal Prerogative and installed his own unique POV stuff on this page. Such an action is blatently against wiki rules and borders on vandalism. I ended up having to undo everything. Thanks to his behaviour, links were broken all over the place and were pointing to the wrong pages. I have reported him as an annoying user. If he tries to maliciously remove entire articles from their pages and bury them in phoney names to instate his own text on the user page I will call for his banning. (As here, on Divine right of kings he has been adding in his own unique theories which are unsupported by any document or textbook anywhere, he mixing up terms, concepts and meanings, ignoring not just all the documentary evidence but everyone else on the talk page.) FearÉIREANN 19:25 26 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Jtdirl's accusation of maliciousness on my part (User:Hlavac) is absurd. I took a blank page which was blank for a number of weeks at least, added my perfectly valid view of the subjects under discussion. It is not a point of view pulled out of the air -- but a very reasoned explanation of the idea as I have been examining it for over thirty years of the study of government and politics. Further, the idea that somehow because a connection was not previously made in a 'textbook' or 'document' read by my erstwhile colleague it can therefore have no validity is a mockery of scholarship -- why, it would negate almost the whole of human learning -- which has sought to make these very before-not-seen connections.

There was no one else to ignore on the talk page on these subjects save Roadrunner, whose commentary has been most welcome -- and Jtridl himself. And I wholeheartedly disagree with his limited view.

All headings in wiki are technically "made-up names" -- and part of this entire process strikes me as to find those delineations between ideas and facts. I did not try to bury any idea anywhere nor alter Jtdirl's text -- in fact I didn't touch it -- merely set it off for the English-centric explanation that it is. And made sure that is was linked and noted that it was a apt explanation as seen from England -- hardly burying it.

As for breaking links -- as near as I can tell the links are not touched or broken when the article is moved because the links are embedded in the text and not external to it -- and I did not at all alter his text or even question it on it's still apt explanation of the British view of these subjects.

As for reporting me, and I quote "I have reported him as an annoying user" I find this rather like excercising his own 'royal prerogative' -- annoying because I disagree? Or because I see a clear and direct connection where he sees none? Why not just ban free speach and be done with it? As for getting me banned -- it just seems so autocratic -- why does Jtridl seem to think he has the one and only and last word on this subject? I find that appalling.

I quote Wiki from this very page: If you don't want your writing to be edited mercilessly and redistributed at will, then don't submit it here.

User:Hlavac -- "let's look for the connections everywhere."

All headings in wiki are technically "made-up names" -- no, this is not the case. Article titles should be the commonly-used name of things. -- Tarquin 20:47 26 Jul 2003 (UTC)

This is an encylopædia, Hlavac, it is not a plaything to write pet theories. This article was the product of people doing factual research, not making it up as they go along. If absurdities and irrelevancies are added it they are removed. Royal Prerogative means something specific in law. If you don't like its actual meaning, get involved in politics or the law and change it. But until it is changed wiki has to use the correct meaning in law, not your inaccurate hypothesis. And BTW moving the article was (i) grossly disrespectful to everyone else who contributed, (ii) broke every link to it on wikipedia, (iii) made it difficult for people who have contributed to the original text to do so, as the article they contributed in the absence of a redirect was no longer appearing on the watchlist. Moving an article so you can colonise the original title for your own POV theories is a fundamental break of wiki rules and horrified people who saw it. If you keep trying to do that you will be banned. FearÉIREANN 21:06 26 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I'm a fairly neutral observer who doesn't know much about the subject at hand but who is very interested in history in general anyway. As such, I explored the only resource on this subject that I happen to have - Google. I skimed the top 100 search results and to my mild astonishment only one was not in the context of British/Scottish history: [1].

So in my less than expert opinion I feel that Hlavac needs good print and/or reputable website references to back up the assertion that the term Royal Prerogative is used commonly and correctly outside of the context of British/Scottish monarchy.

We do not make up terms or defintions here - we report what the prevailing views on subjects are per our NPOV policy. Just because a term "could be" applied outside of its native context doesn't mean that we should pretend it does when in fact it does not. --mav

I suspect that Belgian example is based on a translation and the royal prerogative there is simply a translator's term for Arrete Royale (a royal Statutory Instrument, or in Britain what would be known as an Order-in-Council). FearÉIREANN 21:26 26 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Is the use of the phrase "ID Card's Minister" in the closing paragraph prejudicial?

--Ror 16:50, 2 January 2006 (UTC)

I would argue that the Case of Proclamations was more related to the Extraordinary Perogative rather than the Perogative which exists today. Echo park00 11:10, 5 April 2006 (UTC)

Added the prerogative over the numbering of monarch in accordance with ruling in MacCormick v. Lord Advocate - Elizabeth II using her prerogative may be so styled in Scotland without breaching 1707 Act of union, in spite of Elizabeth (I) only having ruled England Wales and Cornwall, not scotland. [[[User:Graldensblud|Graldensblud]] 21:03, 29 August 2006 (UTC)]

User: plerdsus

Much is said about the unlimited sovereignity of Parliament. Surely that has not really been the case since the Parliament act of 1911. If a future Parliament were to enact legislation defining the powers of Parliament, and enact that the Parliament for amending that law would include the people voting in a referendum, would not that limit a future parliament? Similarly with the Perogative.