why a Monarch? Why does a country need a Queen or King in the modern world? Why should the people of England pay for the lavish lifestyles of the Royal families? I just don’t understand the snobbish attitude of the Queen especially in regards to Dianna and even some nasty comments towards Kate and her family. After Dianna died the queen was supposed to have been shocked at the affection so many people had for Dianna. Why? The British people were disgusted the way the Queen acted during the days after Dianna’s death. Since Charles was older and decided to do his duty he should have been better with his young naive bride and kept himself out of the bed of Camellia. If he was strong enough to marry someone he had to then he should have been man enough not to sleep with another man’s wife. None of this would matter, all this bad behavior except for the snobbishness and the reeking of elitism from the Royal family. Let us hope William one day will stand on his own.
The bottom line is - because it works. The system of constitutional monarchy that is in place in the United Kingdom and parts of the Commonwealth is a system that has evolved over a period of more than 1000 years to create a nation that has, at times, stood as the most powerful nation in the world, and even today remains a significant power. It is a nation that is, consistently, among the freeest in the world, a nation that consistently, has had one of the highest standards of living in the world, that has had one of the most profound influences on world culture of any nation on Earth. In short, it is a system that works.
The geniuses who wrote the United States of America's Declaration of Independence made the following statement within that profound document:
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes
and they worked very hard to try and make the Monarchy continue to work in the United States:
Nor have we been wanting in attention to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence.
They only resorted to revolution and replacement of that system of government when all reasonable efforts to reform it failed:
They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace friends.
You do not lightly replace a system of government that is working well for a people and a nation. If this is not the case - as it was not the case in the American colonies by the second half of the eighteenth century, for example, it is absolutely right and sensible to look for a replacement. But where it is working - and it does work well in the United Kingdom, and the Commonwealth Realms - it is not something to be changed purely for symbolic reasons.
Again, to go back to America's Declaration of Independence, because I believe it states the reasons a change may be justified (and indeed, clearly was justified in the case of the American colonies that became the United States of America) better than any other document:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.
In Britain, and those Commonwealth Realms that have retained the Monarchy, this is the role it serves - the Crown acts as a guarantor of people's rights, as a balance to the power of the legislature. One of the clearest examples of this occurred in my own homeland of Australia as recently as 1975 - a socialist Prime Minister leading a socialist government attempted to continue governing by illegal means, having lost control of the Parliament. The constitutional crisis was ended by the Queen's representative, removing him from office, and replacing him, temporarily, with a Prime Minister who would act within the law, and also call an election so the people could decide the issue once and for all. There have been other less dramatic examples more recently - the power of the Crown has been exercised subtly to resolve issues of who should form governments in hung parliament situations in both Australia and the UK over the last couple of years.
For us, the monarchy is a positive thing.
Why does a country need a Queen or King in the modern world?
Why does a country need a flag? Why does a country need a national anthem? It's not always about need.
But the fact is, while no country needs a Queen or King, in the case of the constitutional Monarchies of the United Kingdom, and the Commonwealth Realms, the role is actually an important constitutional one that acts as a balance to the power of the legislature. Simply removing the Monarch would create a massive power imbalance and remove an important control that prevents a Prime Minister or Parliament acting in a tyrannical fashion. Britain and the Realms have such stable governments that it is very rare for the Crown to need to intervene, but a large part of the reason for that is because the Crown could intervene - Prime Ministers and Parliament rarely come close to going too far, because they know it will not be permitted.
And you can not simply and easily replace the Monarch with some other person (say, an elected President, for example) because so many of the Crown's powers are limited by conventions rather than hard and fast laws. The Queen could dissolve Parliament, imprison the Prime Minister, call out the Army and govern by military power enforcing her decrees - there is little to stop her doing that in law. What limits her is the fact that hundreds of years of convention says that she should not (or rather that this would be a last desperate act in an extreme emergency that it never likely to arise). Would an elected President feel so restrained? This is actually the situation that existed in Germany in the early 1930s, by the way - Germany replaced its Kaiser with a President with the same powers as the Kaiser, and so when Hitler achieved the Presidency, he had all the traditional powers but none of the traditional restraints.
The United States has made a Republican form of government work well - very well indeed - but if you look at history, somewhere like Cuba or Venezuela are more typical examples of the Republican model. Abandoning a system of constitutional Monarchy that is working well, for a system of government that historically fails quite a lot of the time makes little sense. The time to change your form of government is when the system you have is no longer working. Not when it is. For the United States, that situation did occur in the late 1700s. In the United Kingdom, and much of the Commonwealth, it did not. Where it did - India, for example, or Ireland, change occurred. If it ever stops working where it is working, change will occur there as well. But for the moment, it works.
Why should the people of England pay for the lavish lifestyles of the Royal families?
They don't. The Crown actually pays more than ten times as much into the British treasury each year than it takes out of it - £200,000,000 in versus less than £20,000,000 out. I could go into this in more detail, but basically the Crown has, since the reign of George III, voluntarily ceded most of its annual income to the Treasury, in exchange for a fixed income to cover the expenses of the Monarch and their Consort, and for a long time, that income has far exceeded that expense amount. In simple terms, the Queen pays about an 80% tax rate on her income at the moment.
I just don’t understand the snobbish attitude of the Queen especially in regards to Dianna and even some nasty comments towards Kate and her family.
No, what you don't understand is what certain sections of the media say the Queen's attitude was to Diana and towards Kate and the Middletons. This is not the same thing at all. There are certain people, and certain media outlets, that enjoy trying to create controversies that really have no basis in reality.
After Dianna died the queen was supposed to have been shocked at the affection so many people had for Dianna.
This however, was not true. Her Majesty knew very well how well loved Diana was - and was very fond of her, herself, as it happens, though I think it would be too far to say she loved her.
Why? The British people were disgusted the way the Queen acted during the days after Dianna’s death. Since Charles was older and decided to do his duty he should have been better with his young naive bride and kept himself out of the bed of Camellia. If he was strong enough to marry someone he had to then he should have been man enough not to sleep with another man’s wife.
I don't disagree - but I will say that both Charles and Diana had relationships outside of marriage that began at about the same time, and only their very closest friends - and possibly not even them - really know who did it first. The fact is, both tried to make the marriage work and both only had affairs after both of them had concluded that there was no chance that it was going to work.
None of this would matter, all this bad behavior except for the snobbishness and the reeking of elitism from the Royal family. Let us hope William one day will stand on his own.
William will do his duty by his country and the Commonwealth, as he sees it to be. If the British people, and those of the Commonwealth Realms, want him to be King, he will be King. If they choose to replace the Monarchy with something else, he will support them in that.