Nigel Farage on course for landslide victory

Technically, I think the King can dissolve parliament, but only at the request of the PM.

IIRC Labour has a very large majority and they have four more years in power.I'd be interested to hear what FR's "Royal Consultant"...naturalman1975...might have to say about this. IIRC he's said in the past that the monarch doesn't like to get involved in politics...at least not in any open fashion.

The quisling Labour misgovernment has 4 years until the next general election. They’ve got time to jail their opponents, to set up fraud, and to register their migrant invasion constituency. Of course the BBC, the Economist, and the rest of the fraud press will be egging them on. They have the time, the opportunity, and propaganda excuses to heavily rig their chances in the next election.

It’s much more than that.

Considering nine councils recently had their elections postponed, whenever it’s held is a good way to put it.

At least Quisling, in his mind, thought he was doing what was in the best interests of the Norwegian people, as wrong as he was.

Constitutionally, the King could dissolve Parliament, without the Prime Minister requesting it, but the situation would have to be incredibly unusual - it would have to involve a government and Prime Minister acting completely outside the bounds of all constitutional practice and nothing like that seems even close to happening. Maybe if there was a vote of no confidence, and the Prime Minister refused to resign, or ask for an election - something that would be the absolute minimum threshold, and even then the King would probably take less action.

Something that is important to understand under the Westminster system and its derivatives - is that good governments - and even bad governments - are supposed to avoid put the King, or the King's representatives in the situation where they have to use their reserve powers, and for the most part, the mother Parliament at Westminster (that is the British Parliament) has observed that practice. Some of the derived Parliaments haven't always been as careful and looking at what happens is those is interesting in seeing the limits of the system.

We've actually got a situation in Australia at the moment with one of our state level Parliaments. Our Parliaments (state and federal) basically operate on the same principles as the British Parliament with the same constitutional structures. The King is represented by his appointed Governor General at federal level, and by his appointed Governors at state level. They have the powers of the Crown.

Our smallest state, Tasmania (only about half a million people) has a rather small Parliament - only 35 members in its lower house, and 15 in its upper house. As is standard, in Westminster Parliamentary systems, the government is the party that controls the lower house, and its leader is referred to as the Premier. So for comparison with the UK system, think of the Premier as being like the Prime Minister - leader of the elected government - and the Governor being like the King - not elected but with ultimate authority.

Tasmania had an election last year where no party won a majority (18 seats). The Liberals won 14, Labour won 10, the Greens won 5, and the Jacquie Lambie Network won 3, and there were 3 independents.

The 3 Jacquie Lambie Network MPs and one of the independents agreed to support the Liberals on 'supply and confidence' which allowed the incumbent Premier, and leader of the Liberal Party, Jeremy Rockcliffe, to remain in office.

For various reasons, I won't go into (they don't matter in terms of a constitutional discussion), on 11 June this year, the leader of the opposition (leader of the Labour Party) Dean Winter, moved a motion of no confidence in the government and it passed because the people who had agreed to support the government on confidence and supply changed their mind.

By constitutional convention, if a Premier (or a Prime Minister) loses the confidence of the parliament, they are supposed to do one of two things - resign, or ask the Governor (or Governor General or King) to dissolve Parliament.

Rockcliff chose the latter course and here's where we actually see a rare example of a Governor actually using their powers. The Governor, Barbara Baker, initially refused to dissolve Parliament. She had concerns that a new election wouldn't actually fix the problem, so she wanted some time to consider whether or not another solution could be found. In the end, she did dissolve Parliament after only a couple of days, but this is an illustration that despite what a lot of people thing, these offices are not just rubber stamps.

Now, delaying a decision, or even refusing an election, is less dramatic and serious than a Governor (etc) dissolving Parliament on their own decision - it has a much lower threshold, but it does indicate that the powers are still real and present.

(Aside - they've had the election, and basically nothing changed - the Liberals won 14 seats - exactly the same as before - and Labor won 10 seats - exactly the same as before. The Governor has recommissioned Rockcliff as Premier, but Parliament hasn't resumed sitting yet, and its quite possible the opposition will move another motion of no confidence on the first day it does, and then things will get very interesting constitutionally. The Governor is likely to be very reluctant to allow a third election in eighteen months that won't solve anything.) Anyway - that's a recent and current situation that shows the 'reserve powers' are still very real, even if good governments try to avoid them being used. But delaying or even refusing a dissolution of Parliament is less dramatic than a King doing so on their own authority would be.

That is something that would be avoided unless a situation was extremely constitutionally problematic.

The closest remotely recent examples where that even came close to happening were, again, both Australian examples. The most recent was fifty years ago, and even then it didn't quite happen.

This is referred to in Australia as 'The Dismissal' or more formally the Constitutional Crisis of 1975.

Again, I won't go into all the things that lead up to it, but the short version is that the Labour government of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam had firm control of the lower house of the Australian Parliament (the House of Representatives) but had lost control of the upper house (the Senate - yes, Australia's two House of Parliament have the same names as the houses of the US Congress - they were deliberately copied from there). The conservative opposition, lead by Malcolm Fraser used their control of the Senate to 'block supply' - they blocked the budget. This was unusual, and only happened because of some rather unusual political circumstances, including some seriously corrupt behaviour by one of Whitlam's Ministers (which, to be fair to him, Whitlam probably had no idea about).

Again, under the constitutional conventions of the Westminster system, if a government can't pass a budget ('get supply') the Prime Minister is supposed to ask the Crown - the King in the UK, the Governor General at federal level (Sir John Kerr in 1975) in Australia - to dissolve Parliament.

Whitlam refused to do this. He refused to ask the Governor General to dissolve Parliament. Somehow he had managed to convince himself that the Governor General was just a rubber stamp who could only do things if the Prime Minister asked him to.

Well, he was wrong - but even if this situation, Sir John Kerr chose to avoid the 'nuclear option' of dissolving Parliament without the request of a Prime Minister. He could have done that, but it would have been an extraordinary intervention. Instead, he came up with another way - he called in the leader of the opposition, Malcolm Fraser and asked him what he would do if he was commissioned as Prime Minister. Fraser told him he would immediately tell the Senate to pass the budget, and that as soon as that had happened, he'd ask the Governor General to dissolve Parliament.

So Sir John Kerr sacked Whitlam as Prime Minister, and also sacked all of the Ministers. He appointed Fraser as Prime Minister, and Fraser did what he had said - sent a message to the Senate to pass the Budget, and then asked the Governor General to dissolve Parliament. There was an election a month later and the electorate elected Fraser and the Liberal/Country coalition in a massive landslide, showing that they pretty much approved how things had been handled.

Again, this shows that the powers exist - but they also show they if you can, you find a less dramatic approach.

The previous example of this happening was also Australian - at state level in New South Wales in 1932. I'll try and keep this short, but basically the Labour Premier of NSW at the time, Jack Lang, decided NSW wasn't going to pay its debts (this was the height of the Great Depression) most of which were owed to the Bank of England. He even went so far as to withdraw all of the state governments money from the banks and put it in the trade union headquarters building. He was acting totally illegally, so the state Governor Sir Philip Game, dismissed Lang from office, and appointed the Leader of the Opposition Bertram Stevens as Premier. Similar to what happened later in 1975, Bertram Stevens then immediately asked the Governor to dissolve Parliament, and again won the subsequent election, giving the people's endorsement to the decision. Sir Philip Game famously wrote the following in a letter later: "Still with all his faults of omission and commission I had and still have a personal liking for Lang and a great deal of sympathy for his ideals and I did not at all relish being forced to dismiss him. But I felt faced with the alternative of doing so or reducing the job of Governor all over the Empire to a farce."

The powers are real. They are there.

But the threshold for using them is high.

And the threshold for a King actually dismissing a government without a Prime Minister asking would be extremely high. If it ever happens in the UK, I suspect the King would act in a similar fashion to his Australian representatives in those last two cases - dismiss the Prime Minister and appoint a new one to give him the 'advice' he wants. But even that would only happen if a Prime Minister acted outside of all precedent and refused to ask for an election when convention demanded he did, or started acting like a dictator completely ignoring the law.

Thanks for a very thoughtful and thorough reply. It's funny that you should mention Sir John Kerr and Gough Whitlam. Just the other day I was watching a youtube video of one of your former PMs,Paul Keating,speaking in Parliament about Sir John just after his death. He made it clear that he didn't hold him in high regard and that he strongly disagreed with his sacking of Whitlam.His comments struck me as petty but I'm sure that some might disagree.

I'm sure you've figured out by now that we Yanks...well,some of us at least...don't fully understand the British Parliamentary system.

The Labour Party (and Keating was a Labour PM) still has a lot of bitterness about 1975, although most of them now concede that Kerr did what he should have constitutionally, and aim most of their anger at Malcolm Fraser - with, to be fair, some justification. Fraser acted within the constitution but skirted it. The reason he managed to get control of the Senate was constitutional but played hard and loose with convention - by convention, if a Senator had to be replaced they were supposed to be replaced with a Senator from the same party to maintain the status quo of the last election. The conservative parties didn't observe this convention twice in 1975 - in NSW when a Labour Senator resigned to become a High Court Judge, the conservative (Liberal) NSW government appointed an independent, on the basis that they felt the convention only applied when a Senator died, not when they resigned, and then later when a Labour Senator from Queensland died, the Country party government of Queensland did appoint a member of the Labour Party, but one who hated Whitlam and who said he'd never support him. Labour challenged that appointment on constitutional grounds and that Senator never took office. Fundamentally these two decisions changed the Senate from Labour having a 31-29 control to the conservative coalition having 30-29.

It was all technically constitutional, but it was unusual to go against convention like that. Fraser used the corrupt behaviour by some Labour members to justify it, and the people ultimately endorsed that at the 1975 election after the Dismissal, but I can actually understand why Labour still felt Fraser hadn't quite 'played cricket'. And only two years later in 1977, the Constitution was altered by referendum to make it much harder for Senate vacancies to be filled by somebody who wasn't from the same party as the Senator who left.

As for Keating... I think he might have a particular bitterness about 1975, because three weeks before the Dismissal, he'd just been appointed to his first ministry - he became Minister for Northern Australia on 21st October 1975. His career was just taking off and being thrown out of office so suddenly to spend the next seven years in opposition must have been galling.