I believe in constitutional monarchy. I do not consider it a pleasant anachronism that there is little point in removing. I believe in it. Here’s why.
First, two distinctions. I am not a royalist. I feel no particular attachment to the current family of royals, nor any personal loyalty to them as such, beyond that respect the Queen has earned through doing her job well. Neither am I a believer in hereditary monarchy. My fealty, insofar as it exists, is to the role, not the person or the family. I see no reason why a monarch from another family might not, in principle, do the job just as well.
What is that job? I see it in three parts. First, the constitutional monarch is the resolver. Any constitution must offer us ways out of various impasses. One way to proceed is to have a document in which are written the many complex situations that might arise and how they should be resolved. Unfortunately for such a scheme, one cannot anticipate every eventuality and what will be the best way to resolve matters then, and even for some situations one can anticipate it may be too complicated to specify exactly what should be done, depending on the details, for it to be practical to write it down in advance. Worse than this, as time moves on, the responses/solutions that seemed best at the time the constitutional document was written may become obsolete as society’s values and expectations change. So systems that rely on written constitutions tend to need two additional features: some small set of individuals, such as a constitutional court (or, in a theocratic system, perhaps some college of senior religious leaders), to deal with the unanticipated and unspecifiable situations by “interpreting” what the constitutional document would have said; and some process by which the constitutional document can be amended to take account of the changes in society’s needs. In such a system the font of the constitution is the written document.
A more elegant solution than these, in my view, is to have an appointed resolver — the monarch. Because the monarch is a person, she can respond precisely to each new circumstance as it arises, and there is no intrinsic issue of adaptation to unforeseen contingencies or changes in society. The monarch is, at all times, a complete (since able to respond to everything) and up-to-date (since living) constitutional resolver.
As against this, the advocate of a written document as resolver might argue that the written document allows greater scope for anticipating what constitutional resolution there will be, and hence greater certainty. I see little reason to suppose that this is so in the unforeseen cases, but let us dwell a moment on the more mundane everyday cases. It is true that if the resolutions offered by the monarch are too arbitrary or seen to be inappropriate then there will be a problem. To deal with this, it is important that the monarch acts as the front-man of a tradition, an organic thread of customary responses, rather than just reflecting her own whim. But if this tradition can be built up and allowed to evolve gently through time, then in my view it is clearly superior to use the monarch.
The next role of the constitutional monarch is as preserver. Representative democracy is an excellent system for delivering a bloodless exchange of power. It allows us to “kick the rotters out” without also putting their heads on poles. But, first, the will of the voter is by no means guaranteed to be always pleasant or acceptable; and, second, those elected need a time of authority to put through their programme (e.g. the five years of a Parliament), which grants them scope to seek to enact unpleasant and unacceptable measures, even if these were not mentioned at the original election time.
One way to limit the danger of unpleasant programmes either being deliberately voted for or enacted is to have a written document specifying limitations on the authority of the elected legislature. For example, this might take the form of a Bill of Rights or it might be part of the written constitutional document referred to above. One problem with this concerns how it is to be amended. With a sufficient majority, many legislatures would be able to overturn limitations on their unpleasantness theoretically provided by written documents. Another possibility is to have a set of judges, independent of the political process, who would refuse to judge in favour of any sufficiently unpleasant law. Another (complementary) way to proceed is to have a second chamber in the legislature, which is not elected, which has the role of forbidding or slowing the passage of sufficiently unpleasant laws. Another (again complementary) preserver of ordered liberty is a constitutional monarch.
Again, the weakness of the constitutional monarch is the risk that the monarch’s judgements will be arbitrary or inappropriate — perhaps forbidding some legislation that does not threaten ordered liberty and permitting other legislation that would have that effect. So, again, the monarch will only be able to fulfil this role if acting as the front-man of an organic thread of custom. If that thread can be created and sustained, then I believe the constitutional monarch is likely to be the more effective preserver, and more likely to protect ordered liberty in practice.
(Incidentally, in passing it seems to me that there is no issue of a monarch being “undemocratic” here — even if one were attached to the intrinsic merits of “the people’s will”, which I am not. A written document is not a democratic device; it is (and is intended to be) a check on democracy. The monarch is simply, in this sense, an alternative check on democracy.)
The last role of the constitutional monarch that I wish to mention is connected to the previous one — the role of appointer. To function as the front-man of an organic tradition, the monarch will be more successful if there are other people and other elements to the constitution that also embody that tradition. To maintain that organic thread, there should be other people within the tradition — Lords, judges, Queen’s Counsel, privy counsellors. These will most effectively sustain that tradition if they are appointees within that tradition (i.e. by the monarch or the monarch’s personal appointees) rather than, say, appointees of the Prime Minister. Thus the constitutional monarch should be an independent location of executive authority, in addition to falling within the authority of Crown-in-Parliament.
In my opinion, all of these roles of the constitutional monarchy have become severely undermined over the past century. And unless Conservative thinkers start to make the positive case for the constitutional monarchy, it will simply fade away, to be replaced by an inferior written document system.
So, what’s it to be?
