She still gave royal assent to the 1967 Abortion Act and 2013 Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Act. It’s been argued that actually using her reserve power of refusing assent would somehow have created a constitutional crisis, but it should have been put to the test because a constitutional government without veto power is an actual tyranny.
Oh, it’s worse than giving royal assent! The royal family agitated for population control.
“One must remember that resources are finite and cannot accommodate indefinite population growth. Families must plan their families just as the Government has to plan the Nation’s development. There can be no long-term stability when the rate of population growth exceeds the rate of job creation.”
Also her (although citing her husband): ““If the world pollution situation is not critical at the moment, it is as certain as anything can be, that the situation will become increasingly intolerable within a very short time … If we fail to cope with this challenge, all the other problems will pale into insignificance.””
What she said is actually worse than the context of her husband’s comments. Her husband had been talking in 1969 about pollution in general: lead, sulfur, industrial byproducts, trash. All these problems were kicked 50 years later, when she recycled his words, but in a new context, of overpopulation and carbon emissions. Indeed, every pollutant referenced by her husband had successfully been solved. Carbon “pollution” was invented by the British royal family a decade later as an insurmountable problem (although chiefly the original demonization of carbon was motivated as much by trying to break the backs of the coal-mining strikes, achieving centralized control of all industry is an unmistakable goal).
Yet, even though a lack of industrialization led billions to seek massive families (they are typically not natural), QE2 saw industrialization as something only for England and the corporations under royal control. Instead of describing industrialization, therefore, as improving production, she chose the claptrap of Luddites:
“I have too much love for my poor people who obtain their bread by the employment of knitting to give my money to forward an invention that will tend to their ruin by depriving them of employment and thus making them beggars,”
So industrialization was fine for shipyards and Bentleys, but not India.
The Royal Veto has not been used since the reign of Queen Anne (The Scottish Militia Bill in 1708). It is effectively dead.
Constitutionally, the King or Queen is required to act on the advise of his or her ministers.
It is up to the voters to change the Crown’s ministers when they render bad advice.