Britain should dump the monarchy

Originally posted by Amaurote
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_prerogative

It looks like the dictionary is confused, too...

While I sympathize with your general detestation of the British monarchy and monarchy in general, you might want to reflect that the Gough Whitlam episode you cite occurred without the intervention of the monarch, and that government in general in Canada, A ...[text shortened]... ore basing their admirable and correct opposition to monarchy on the shakiest grounds available.

The royal prerogative is a body of customary authority, privilege, and immunity, recognized in common law and, sometimes, in civil law jurisdictions possessing a monarchy, as belonging to the sovereign alone.

Section 61 of the Constitution provides that 'The executive power of the Commonwealth is vested in the Queen and is exercisable by the Governor‑General as the Queen’s representative, and extends to the execution and maintenance of this Constitution, and of the laws of the Commonwealth'. Section 2 of the Australian Constitution provides that a Governor-General shall represent the Queen in Australia. In practice, the Governor-General carries out all the functions usually performed by a head of state, without reference to the Queen.

Originally posted by finnegan
If we ceased to be a monarchy, maybe people would ask for a more coherent explanation of their status and the reason why the British government fails to curtail their criminal activities.

Originally posted by normbenign
I wonder if this is not just further evidence of the insatiable appetite of leftists to spend other people's money. "Criminal activities" equals keeping more of your own money than is approved of by leftists.

Tax havens are the centre pieces of a shadow financial system that enables users to escape regulations and tax laws in their own countries. These jurisdictions typically offer minimal regulation; little or no taxation on income or capital of non-residents; legally-enforced secrecy; non-disclosure of beneficial ownership of offshore corporations, trusts and foundations; and no effective exchange of information with other countries. As John Christensen notes in his essay, The Hidden Trillions: Secrecy, corruption and the offshore interface, these characteristics make such jurisdictions susceptible to a wide range of criminal and corrupt practices.

The New York gangster Meyer Lansky is widely acknowledged as the architect of offshore money laundering. In his lifetime, Lansky was one of the most powerful crime figures in the United States and the inspiration for the Hyman Roth character in the film The Godfather. Associates said that Lansky possessed a formidable intellect and an exceptional mastery of numbers. Despite determined efforts by U.S. authorities to build a criminal case against him, Lansky spent little time in jail and after a long and rewarding career retired to a comfortable home in suburban Florida.

Lansky and his partners were underworld entrepreneurs. During the Prohibition era, they sold bootleg liquor, organized a truck rental company, established bottling plants, and hijacked goods smuggled by other gangs. They even ran an efficient maritime shipping business to transport high quality Scotch across the Atlantic. [4]

Anxious to avoid the fate of Al Capone, Lansky had made his first foray into Swiss banking in the early 1930s, initially with the Exchange and Investment Bank of Geneva and later with the equally shady International Credit Bank of Switzerland. Lansky pioneered the ‘loan-back” technique. Money would be moved in the form of cash, traveller’s cheques, or bearer bonds for deposit in numbered Swiss accounts. The money then returned home in the form of “loans” to the person who had initiated the cycle who would repay the loan with interest, deducting the interest from his taxable income as a business expense.[5] A variant of this scheme is still used today by multinational corporations to reduce their tax obligations.

As early as 1937, U.S. officials expressed alarm that wealthy Americans were evading taxes by establishing personal holding companies in the British colonies of the Bahamas and Newfoundland.[8] As the Mob developed their activities in the Bahamas, some British officials expressed concern that the offshore industry would bring renewed protests from the U.S. government. The British authorities, however, did nothing. When Lynden Pindling was elected as Premier in 1967 on a platform hostile to gambling and corruption, large parts of the offshore industry moved to the nearby Cayman Islands, a British Overseas Territory. Within a few months, money began to pour into Grand Cayman.[9] The first foreign bank to set up shop was Barclays of the United Kingdom, followed by the Royal Bank of Canada, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and the Bank of Nova Scotia Trust Company.[10] Despite warnings from officials, the British government again did nothing and allowed the Cayman Islands to develop into one of the world’s most notorious sinks for corrupt money.

There are several explanations for the British government’s reluctance to prohibit the development of secrecy jurisdictions in its own territories. By the 1950s and 1960s, the British Empire was collapsing and along with it the wealth that had sustained Britain for centuries. Many colonists and business people in the newly independent countries wanted to take their money out and needed clandestine means to do so.[11] Nicholas Shaxson also suggests that British interests were determined to preserve London’s dominant role in international finance and set out to build a “London-centered web of half-British territories...that would catch financial business from nearby jurisdictions by offering lightly taxed, lightly regulated and secretive bolt holes for money.”[12]

The offshore system proliferated in the late 1950s with the development of the London-based Euromarket which resulted in the liberalization of capital movements and unregulated loan markets. Shaxson notes that the City of London transformed itself into an “offshore island,” servicing businesses that were elsewhere. The market rippled outwards, initially to the Channel Island havens, and then the Caribbean secrecy jurisdictions which became Euromarket booking centres, “secretive and semi-fictional way stations...where the world’s wealthiest individuals and corporations, especially banks, could park their money, tax free and in secrecy...”

Half of all international bank lending and at least half of all global trade on paper is conducted through secrecy jurisdictions, enabling multinational corporations to allocate profits in low-tax jurisdictions and costs to high tax jurisdictions. Secrecy jurisdictions host more than two million “international business corporations,” usually little more than shell companies with a postal address. The British Virgin Islands, with a population of 25,000, hosts an estimated 460,000 business corporations.[20] One modest building in the Cayman Islands is home to more that 18,000 of these entities. Before being exposed as a spectacular fraud, Enron had more than 6,500 shell companies, 600 of which were registered in the Cayman Islands. A December 2008 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office revealed that 83 of the 100 largest publicly-traded companies in the U.S., including big banks receiving bail-out money, have scores of offshore subsidiaries.

Originally posted by finnegan
Why is the dictionary confused?

The royal prerogative is a body of customary authority, privilege, and immunity, recognized in common law and, sometimes, in civil law jurisdictions possessing a monarchy, as belonging to the sovereign alone.

Q: What are Royal Prerogatives?

A series of historic powers officially held by the Queen that have, in reality, been passed to politicians.

Originally posted by finnegan
You just insist on a pointless word play.

The Queen personally may operate as a very nice housekeeper for Windsor Castle and hostess for garden parties. That is incidental to the fact that there are a range of important powers that are withheld from Parliament and held in her name. The notion of elective dictatorship captures the reality that an electe ...[text shortened]... ht risk of a future monarch getting more inclined than she is to test out the scope of the role.

Originally posted by Amaurote
Oh, cobblers. You can hide behind meaningless inkjet phrases like "essential to the configuration of dictatorship" all you like, but the powers don't belong to the monarch, whatever their origin, as you've just again inadvertently acknowledged - contrary to your original position. You also haven't explained why we need to get rid of the monarch to remove ab ...[text shortened]... be a bit warier quoting the Devil to bolster your manifesto for the New Jerusalem if I were you.

Originally posted by finnegan
Fine. So by your account getting rid of the Queen will change nothing. I disagree.

Originally posted by Shallow Blue
He didn't say that. He said it wouldn't make things better.

And in my estimation, at any rate, replacing the monarchy with a politically-motivated head of state would, in fact, make things worse, not better. Can you say: "President Boris"? *shudder*

Originally posted by AThousandYoung
The idea of Harry on the throne gives me nightmares.

Originally posted by finnegan
You will find plenty of evidence that tax havens conceal and launder the proceeds of corruption and crime as well as assisting illegal tax evasion and illegal evasion of regulatory controls.