If the monarchy's silly, it doesn't work

Rob Hosking at the National Business Review writes in defence of the monarchy. I would write a detailed response, but because the content is behind the NBR paywall, it can't be copied under the fair dealing provisions of the Copyright Act 1994. Yes, a bit annoying, but I promise you're not missing much.

The title of the article gives you a fair idea of his argument though. It's one we hear often: the monarchy might be "silly" (that usually is a polite way of saying it's discriminatory, foreign and unfair) but "it works". It's as if being a republican means suspending practical outcomes under the monarchy for some sort of fanciful utopia, based soley on doctronaire attitudes. This is much like those political science students in their first year at university who say "Communism's fine in theory, but not very good in reality". As my anarcho-capitalist friend Stephen Whittington puts it "What good is a theory that has bad practical outcomes? No one would say that they had a good invention in theory, but it did not work in practice."

So it's hard to see how a system of government a great number of the populace considers "silly" works, even in a constitutional sense. The simple fact is that it is false attribution to claim our parliamentary democracy works because of the monarchy. In fact, constitutional observers of Westminster imply the opposite: it is the non-intervention of the monarchy that ensures the efficient running of government, the monarchy simply provides a disguise to allow this to happen. Exactly why the monarchists choose to ignore or contradict this fact bemuses us - saying the Queen keeps politicians in check when constitutionalists say the purpose of the monarchy is to not get in the way (and there's no evidence the Queen does intervene in the Commonwealth realms, by the way) is simply argumentative sophistry.