Free Law Dissertations - Under The United Kingdom’s Constitution, All Manners Of The Government
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Under the United Kingdom’s constitution, all manners of the government are assumed in the honour of the Crown. Any account of the prerogative is an account of authority, and the prerogative, traditionally and contemporarily, involves the power of the Crown. Nowadays, the prerogative epitomizes one of the most fascinating characteristics of the unwritten constitution.
The prerogative powers of the Crown are those powers that take place out of the common law which are exclusive to the Crown. Two descriptions may be specified by way of introduction. Dicey states that, the prerogative powers were ‘the residue of arbitrary and discretionary powers legally left in the hands of the Crown’ which, being implemented by the government in the honour of the Crown involves ‘every act which the executive government can do without the authority of an Act of Parliament.’ Blackstone, on the other hand, proposes a more restricted explanation:
That special pre-eminence which the King hath over and above all persons, and out of the ordinary course of the common law And only applied to those rights and capacities which the King enjoys in contradistinction to others.
Joseph Chitty, who advances the most thorough explanation of the prerogative, describes the need for prerogative power in the subsequent quotation:
The rights of sovereignty, or supreme power, are of a legislative and executive nature, and must, under any form of government, be vested exclusively in a body or bodies, distinct from the people at large.
In Chitty’s scrutiny, the power of the King is an element of a reciprocal affiliation concerning monarch and subject. The King is owed a responsibility of loyalty on the part of all subjects; the subjects are owed the duty of protection.
In the United Kingdom’s unwritten constitution, there is no official and settled text as to the prerogative. To determine the contents of the prerogative, an assessment of the historical characteristics of the Crown and the manner of the courts to the prerogative is necessary. It is paradoxical, but unquestionable, in a contemporary democratic system, that there is no complete, dependable record of prerogative powers.
Though regal powers are applied in the name of the Crown by the government of the day, the Crown nonetheless maintains imperative residual powers. The most noteworthy include: the dissolution of Parliament and the appointment of Prime Minister. It ought to be acknowledged that a small number of powers remain the personal prerogative of the Crown. Examples incorporated the grant of honours such as the Order of Merit, and the Orders of the Garter and Thistle. More significantly, there even now remains the prerogative view that the Crown under no circumstances dies and that the Crown is never an infant, accordingly, guaranteeing permanence of the monarchy, and that the Crown can ‘do no wrong.
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