Original article title: Courtier demanded assurance king could not be prosecuted under new Welsh law
A Buckingham Palace official phoned the Welsh government to secure the assurance under an archaic custom that requires UK parliaments to obtain the consent of the monarch to draft bills before they can be implemented.
According to Buckingham Palace, the royal household rang the Welsh government to ensure that “as a matter of legal correctness” the monarch could not be prosecuted under the act.
The monarchy has been given personal immunity from swathes of British law, ranging from animal welfare to workers’ rights.
More than 30 laws stipulate, for example, that police are barred from entering the privately owned Balmoral and Sandringham estates without the king’s permission to investigate possible crimes, including wildlife offences and environmental pollution. No other private landowner in the country is given such legal immunity.
A Welsh government spokesperson said: “The immunity of the monarch from prosecution is a long-established principle.” They declined to comment further.
On the one hand, I already knew that the monarchy is exhempt from the laws that govern the rest of us regular plebeians. Because they are rich.
But I certainly did not realise that it was so… overt? Like, they don’t even pretend to follow the same rules as us, they literally write exemptions for themselves into the law. It’s disgusting. And they dare call it "a matter of legal correctness”. The injustice makes my blood boil.
It’s kinda worse than that, they blackmail elected officials into creating specific loopholes for them: “make one exempt from this law or one may well stop it passing.”
Thing is, they could call his bluff, because if he did stop the law going through there would be uproar.
They could call his bluff, but what would a Tory be doing preventing a wealthy heir from excusing himself from an inconvenient law?
“But I could become royalty one day and then what?”
Is the British version of the “temporarily embarrassed millionaire”?
Not really no. In the UK our institutionalised classism is explicitly written down in law. Makes things less confusing, you see.
I guess I thought that this was well known. Crimes are prosecuted in the name of the Crown. Passports are issued in the name of the Crown. Drivers licenses are issued in the name of the Crown. Charles doesn’t need either of these and can’t be prosecuted because he’d be, sort of, prosecuting himself.