(03-29-2019, 06:37 PM)robkelk Wrote:(03-29-2019, 03:52 PM)Labster Wrote: Can the Queen still dissolve Parliament and call new elections? It's starting to look like a reasonable option. May's Government is doing their level best to make dictatorial powers look attractive.
The Sovereign is free to dissolve Parliament on the advice of the Prime Minister.
That's the dirty little secret behind constitutional Parliamentary democracies: once somebody's been elected the leader of a majority party that votes along the party line, the Prime Minister pretty much is a dictator. Constrained by the constitution (written or unwritten) and the rule of law, of course, but that's all the constraints that there are on a PM. (At least in Canada, the party leader actually has to have a seat in the House of Commons before being allowed to become PM... but there's always somebody who's willing to give up a "safe" seat in exchange for a plum political appointment.)
If we didn't have political parties, that would be different. But there's that magic word "if".
The President basically replaced the Queen here for that role. 90% of the President's powers are 'on the advice of government' to avoid a dictatorship. The subtle difference between us and the UK is that we have multi-seat constituencies, and use a proportional represenation system - so there're a lot more parties, and a lot more coalition governments.
The current Government is technically a minority government - but both major political parties are in an agreement not to trigger a general election until the Brexit crisis is past to let the State get through it. There've been things that should've toppled the government - but it's clung on to get past the big difficulty.
Y'know, arguably how Brexit should've been done by the UK.
A lot of demestic policies have been an utter shitshow - with a housing/homeless crisis, a healthcare crisis, a massive boondoggle and a general sense of everything being a PR Potemkin village - but foreign policy has been good.
I think Australia uses a similar method where everyone justs writes 1,2,3,4....n from top to bottom in the boxes. So whomever decides the order on the paper decides the winner....
I love the smell of rotaries in the morning. You know one time, I got to work early, before the rush hour. I walked through the empty carpark, I didn't see one bloody Prius or Golf. And that smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole carpark, smelled like.... ....speed.
One day they're going to ban them.