After a mere 300 years, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland has found the time to modernise the laws on royal succession:
- Girls born into the royal family will no longer need to cede the throne to their younger brothers. Until now, it was always the eldest son that ascended the throne; even older sisters missed out as long as there was one male, regardless of his age. The current Queen Elizabeth II could only become queen because she didn’t have any brother(s).
- The king or the queen may even marry a Catholic in future. Until now, such a marriage would have disqualified that particular royal from the succession.
If you are now overwhelmed in the light of so much modernisation, equality and progress, I will have to dampen the joy a bit:
- The new rules won’t be relevant for the foreseeable future because Queen ElizabethII’s first child is a son, Prince Charles, who again had only sons, Princes William and Harry. For the next two generations (which based on the reign of the current queen could be 100 years) no woman will become head of state. Only if Prince William and his wife will have a girl as their first child will these rules become relevant.
- Similarly, nobody in the current line of succession has dared to marry a Catholic.
- Furthermore, the lifting of the ban of Catholics only pertains to the spouse of the king or queen. The monarch himself still must not be Catholic. He or she also must not be a Jew, a Muslim, a Mormon or in fact anything else than an Anglican Christian, because the British monarch is also the head of the Anglican church. Having a state religion already sounds far less modern.
- These cosmetic changes cannot hide the fact that we still have an unelected head of state, who reaches this positionexclusively by virtue of his birth, irrespective of any (lacking) qualifications.
Princesses being able to become rulers without democratic legitimation, is no reason to celebrate. Especially not in 2011 and in a country that still doesn’t have a codified constitution.
(Es gibt eine deutsche Version dieses Artikels.)