[TopChed]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

A British monarch hasn’t had absolute power for 800 years. As the article I linked noted, by the time Elizabeth took the throne the Crown had only two very specific roles to play in politics, and even those weren’t exercised after the first few years of her reign.

The Crown endures as an institution in Britain only so long as it doesn’t exercise any real political power.

Royals vetted more than 1,000 laws via Queen’s consent

More than 1,000 laws have been vetted by the Queen or Prince Charles through a secretive procedure before they were approved by the UK’s elected members of parliament, the Guardian has established.

The huge number of laws subject to royal vetting cover matters ranging from justice, social security, pensions, race relations and food policy through to obscure rules on car parking charges and hovercraft.

They included draft laws that affected the Queen’s personal property such as her private estates in Balmoral and Sandringham, and potentially anything deemed to affect her personally.

The Guardian has compiled a database of at least 1,062 parliamentary bills that have been subjected to Queen’s consent, stretching from the beginning of Elizabeth II’s reign through to the present day.