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September 26, 2008
Who says there will always be an England?
Geoffrey Robertson QC, the constitutional lawyer who has represented the paper in challenges to the constitutional restrictions, said last night: "I welcome this as two small steps towards a more rational constitution."The Act of Settlement determined that the crown shall descend only on Protestant heads and that anyone 'who holds communion with the church of Rome or marries a Papist' - not to mention a Muslim, Hindu, Jew or Rastafarian - is excluded by force of law.
"This arcane and archaic legislation enshrined religious intolerance in the bedrock of the British constitution. In order to hold the office of head of state you must be white Anglo-German Protestant - a descendant of Princess Sophia of Hanover - down the male line on the feudal principle of primogeniture. This is in blatant contravention of the Sex Discrimination Act and the Human Rights Act."
The next stage, he said, was for the government to challenge the notion of a head of state who achieved the position through inheritance.
[my emphases]
Modernity takes another step against continuity and in favor of rupture, this time in the name of Human Rights. By the way, I'm not at all sure there's a current problem with mixed race descendants of Princess Sophia of Hanover, so long as they're Anglicans. William or Harry could marry nice Nigerian noblewomen (and goodness knows there are lots of kings there!) and their children would have no constitutional problem.
We see that all this is a pretext. Labour doesn't really care about Catholic princesses or hypothetical Rastafarian princes - the goal is the abolition of the Windsors as hereditary heads of state. They messed with the House of Lords and this is next on the agenda. Not that the craven Tories seem like they'd be likely to resist something like this particularly fiercely, but they might not propose it.
Of course the pressure of Modernity has already reduced any sense of majesty a great deal - I feel more like a historic preservationist than a partisan, as though my feelings in favor of keeping a monarchy around are antiquarian. Alas!
I won't even comment on Robertson's use of the f-word in the 3rd paragraph.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at September 26, 2008 7:37 AM
Comments
Alexander Chancellor's column in the Guardian this morning sees this as an act of covert Republicanism, but I'm not so sure.
This is not an English debate but a British and Northern Irish one. Since the Good Friday agreement and Scottish devolution, there's been a lot of pressure from various quarters for constitutional change. The Catholic church in Scotland has been very vocal, not least because Catholic-Protestant relations in te West of Scotland could be charitably described as "tribal." The "Scottish government" as the new nationalist Scottish executive styles itself, has also been on this bandwagon for reasons of its own. Finally, I think there was a remote but real risk of the challenge to the Act of Successio at the European Court of Human Rights.
I, too, am a sentimental monarchist, and I love the fact that the British constitution, such as it is, still involves a lot of muddling along. I even enjoy Guy Fawkes night. However, I do think that these institutions are robust enough to survive the removal of this egregious bit of "no popery."
And of course, even in the unlikely event that she ceases to be Queen of the United Kingdom, she is still Queen of New Zealand, Australia, Canada, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and quite a few other realms and terriories.
Posted by: Nick Thompson at September 26, 2008 2:43 PM