RE: Labours Disastrous Budget12 Nov 2024 11:58
'During the course of her reign, HRH QUEEN ELIZABETH HAS BEEN GIVEN THE POWER OF CONSENT OVER 1000 LAWS.
AN ARCHAIC CONSTITUTIONAL RULE HAS MEANT THAT PARILAMENT HAS REFERRED DRAFT BILLS COVERING ALL SORTS OF AREAS such as charity law, tenancy law or pensions law, to the Queen who then gave her consent to them.
NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH 'ROYAL ASSENT' that all bills get before they become law, a purely rubber stamping exercise (but perhaps also in need of reform?), the Queen’s consent is a power that has been in place since the 1700s and relates to specific bills that might impact on her private interests'
'There are also reports that the Queen was allegedly able to lobby behind the scenes for changes in a few of the bills that parliament had sent to her: the most startling example is evidence that appears to suggest that the Queen used the procedure to make changes to a 1970s law in order to prevent some of her private wealth becoming public knowledge.'
The Queen’s Consent was reviewed in 2013 by the House of Commons Political and Constitutional Reform Committee and, ironically, a bill was put forward to abolish the power but, in the end, such action was considered unnecessary because: “Parliament’s most senior officials told the committee that it could just drop the consent at any time and it was parliament that chose to put this requirement for consent in place and so could simply change its mind”.
One outcome of the 2013 examination of the Queen’s Consent is that there were slight changes to the power. Prior to that date, “if a sovereign’s interests or prerogatives went to the heart of a bill, there could, potentially, be a block on the bill even being debated so that YOU WOULDN'T EVEN KNOW IF THE QUEEN HAD EXPRESSED VIEWS ON IT. But since then, the power only becomes ‘live’ immediately before the third reading: withholding consent at that stage would be a very public action.”
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