The Monarchy should be abolished
Over the centuries, the traditional prerogatives of the Monarch have increasingly been exercised by the ministers of the Crown in the government of the day, accountable to the elected House of Commons. High time, then, that we took the final step and abolished the entire institution, making the Speaker of the House our official Head of State — insofar as we need one — in a new democratic Commonwealth. Doing it this way means there’s no need to worry about having an elected president or anything like that, and we have a rich tradition of seventeenth-century radicalism on which to draw to provide an appropriate political language for the new order of things.
An uncontroversial enough opinion, you might think. But I read here that putting it into print is enough to earn me a sentence of life imprisonment under the 1848 Treason Felony Act, and that the British courts have today upheld the legality of the Act — despite the passage of the Human Rights Act, which enshrines a right to free expression in law.
I won’t be prosecuted for this weblog entry, obviously enough, but this is a useful occasion for reminding ourselves that these stupid laws aren’t just anomalies left over from the nineteenth century. Jack Straw’s Terrorism Act 2000, which came into force on 19 February 2001, kicks off with an overdrawn definition of terrorism which makes the advocacy of many forms of resistance — including certain kinds of nonviolent resistance — to repressive regimes abroad illegal, with long prison sentences for malefactors.
The laws of 1848 and 2000 are absurd: the sooner we are rid of the pair of them the better.