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Wintonsweek What If? – The Queen Refused To Sign The Hunting Bill? “Imagine the looks on the faces of Tony Blair, the egregious Peter Hain and Tony Banks when they first heard the news from the Palace?” I’ve just had a subversive, but very comforting thought. As the battle lines are drawn between hunters, hunting sympathisers and hunting agnostics - (roughly speaking, all civilised and intelligent Britons) on the one side, and the Left (Labour’s motley crew of second rate college lecturers, money-grubbing lawyers and union subsidised pea brains, welfare state commissars, the guilt-ridden middle classes, barrack-room lawyers, Guardian readers and sandelistas generally) - a way out beckons. This is such a simple idea it is amazing that, as far as I’m aware, nobody’s thought of it before. It seems likely that the House of Lords will throw out the hunting bill, and then, we are told, the government will invoke the Parliament Act to force it through. That would appear to be the end of the road, at least legally, for hunting. But of course there is one more step that the legislation must go through before it becomes law. A step which for nearly 400 years has always been forthcoming and uncontroversial; the act needs the Royal Assent. What if the Queen refused to sign? And she wouldn’t have to do it in the name of hunting, although of course it would seem a certainty that Queen Elizabeth and the rest of her family were among the most outraged over the government’s abuse of parliament in promoting the ban on hunting with dogs. The Queen could refuse to sign the bill on the grounds that the government’s use of the Parliament Act was an abuse of power – the fact that the bill contains a provision that the ban will be delayed for two years, clearly shows there is no element of urgency or principle which could justify the short-circuiting of parliament’s rules. Also it is clear that the government has reneged on promises made to Parliament that it would pay attention to the Burns report, which made clear that hunting foxes with dogs is at least as humane as the alternatives and is in some circumstances the only practicable option. That’s another principled reason to refuse to sign it. Or if she wasn’t up to that, she could go on holiday for a couple of months, or feign some debilitating illness, which sapped her strength, at least until the end of this parliamentary session – that’s about a month I think. No doubt a refusal to sign would mean a storm of outrage from the Left. No doubt this would precipitate a constitutional crisis which might mean the end of the monarchy’s last link with political power. That would be no bad thing, and just an acknowledgement of the reality of the last 400 years. But if Labour gets away with this abuse of power it would mean the end of the House of Lords anyway, and it would effectively mean the ending of the current constitutional arrangements where the monarchy is the theoretical final arbiter of parliament. So the royal family would really not have much to lose. Better to go down in a blaze of glory, rather than wait for Labour to finally destroy the traditional constitutional arrangements. But I suppose in reality there is not much hope that this would happen. The Royals have never shown much of an appetite for political influence. Even a huge political surrender of political power like the Single European Act, which it could be argued effectively meant the end of Briton’s ability to govern itself, apparently didn’t provoke a flicker of anger, or even interest, from the royals. If our constitutional arrangements are to brought crashing down, might the royals at least carve themselves an honourable place in our history, by paying back just a little for the lives of luxury they live by defeating this crass and class-ridden attempt to cow Britain’s middle classes? Go on Ma’am; veto that bill, either by stealth, or by strength of character. Just imagine the looks on the faces of Tony Blair, the egregious Peter Hain and Tony Banks when they first heard the news from the Palace? Doesn’t that make the idea irresistible? Neil Winton – September 20, 2004 |