Saturday, September 13, 2014

More Unionist Than The Queen?

I yield to no one in my love for the United Kingdom, and have made it abundantly clear that I am hoping and praying with every fibre in my being for a NO vote on Thursday. That said, it is totally unacceptable that some Unionists (including a now-ex-Facebook-Friend) have taken to attacking HM the Queen for not having explicitly and publicly told her Scottish subjects how to vote. Either one accepts the British form of parliamentary Constitutional Monarchy or one doesn't. It is all very well to pine for the kind of monarchy in which the Sovereign wields real power, as I often do myself, but that is not the reality that we have at the moment. Whatever one thinks of Alex Salmond, and monarchists certainly have cause to dislike and distrust him, the fact is that in Scotland he is Her Majesty's duly elected First Minister, attempting to do what those who voted for him knew he would attempt to do, and as a constitutional monarch the Queen _cannot_ openly set herself against his government's central policy agenda. And what if a royal intervention backfired, having a negligible effect on changing minds on the Union but pushing some moderately pro-monarchy nationalists towards republicanism? It would be extremely short-sighted to put the Union before the Monarchy. Without disparaging the greatness of the Union one iota, the Crown predates it on both sides of the border by almost a thousand years and is ultimately even more important. God Save the Queen.

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