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saberience ◴[] No.32769157[source]
It's weird, I've never considered myself a "royalist" but this news has affected me quite strongly. I just burst into tears unexpectedly on hearing this news and I don't quite understand why I feel so very sad. I guess I have grown up and lived my whole life (as a Brit) seeing and hearing the Queen, singing "God save the Queen" etc, and this news made me suddenly feel very old, very nostalgic, with the sense that all things pass in time, which makes my heart ache deeply.
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orobinson ◴[] No.32769695[source]
I feel the same. I think it’s because it really represents the end of an era. The 20th and early 21st century ushered in unprecedented improvements to quality of life in Britain but it has felt of late that that has peaked and the country is facing a serious decline: Brexit, the increasingly visible effects of climate change, the aftermath of covid, the possible break up of the union, rising costs of living, recession, possibly even war. The death of Elizabeth II coincides with the end of a long period of stability and comfort and is not only a poignant point in history itself but a marker for a transitional point in history for our country.
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foobarian ◴[] No.32771142[source]
I think humans have evolved to need rulers and hierarchy to look up to to some extent. Look at what happened to Americans -- once the UK royalty was gone it was replaced with celebrity. It's just human nature.
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jollybean ◴[] No.32772931[source]
The Queen is not a 'ruler' though, she's a figurehead.

Which is fully appropriate where it exists.

I would be 100% against the US having a 'Constitutional Monarch' but I'm 100% in support of the UK Constitutional Monarchy, given that it has come from their long established culture, nearly a 1000-year-old 'contiguous-ish' institution.

FYI in 1258 the Monarch signed documents which required him to 'Confer with Parliament' when changing rates of taxation. That's only 40 years past Magna Carta, and the first reference to 'Parliament'.

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elcritch ◴[] No.32775382[source]
I think the British Monarch could in _theory_ have some political power as parliamentary bills go by the monarch for approval. The Queen always approved them of course.

The romantic in me likes to believe the Queen would step in if the British parliament tried passing some truly terrible bill. Basically acting as a last stop gap of human and British sensibility. Though with Queen Elizabeth II gone I'd have less trust in the judgement of a monarch.

Part of me does wonder if US politics would've been much different with a ceremonial figurehead. And that'd be a fun alt-history where a great-great-grandchild of George Washington is the ceremonial head of the US government and has to deal with intrigues of Washington politics while just wanting to live quietly on the ancestral Virginian home.

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geden ◴[] No.32775986{3}[source]
She passed the Brexit bill.

The reality is that it’s consistently been the House of Lords that save us from the nuttier ideas.

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origin_path ◴[] No.32776889{4}[source]
Of course she passed the Brexit bill. The irrational hatred of Brexit you see in some quarters is the exact sort of thing the Queen, in her role as a constitutional icon of long term stability, stood against.

You have to remember how old she was. The Queen's first Prime Minister was Winston Churchill, born in the 1870s. A staunch Empire man to the last, he was one of only two Prime Ministers for whom the Queen attended their funeral. He is famous for successfully defeating Europe when it was united under a dictator determined to reduce Britain to rubble and ship its population to labour camps. She was Queen as the British Empire wound itself up and became the Commonwealth. She saw the nationalization of the British railways and then the re-privatization of them decades later. She saw the birth of the European Coal and Steel Community, she watched as it evolved into the European Economic Community, and then into the European Union. She saw Stalin fall, then she saw the Berlin wall fall, and then the USSR. She observed passively as millions of people from the former Eastern Bloc then moved to the UK a decade later to make a new life. She saw the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She saw the space race. She was Queen throughout the Troubles, living with the constant threat of being assassinated by the IRA, who at one point dropped a concrete breeze block on her car. She visited over 100 countries. She watched as countries fell to communist revolutions. She watched her country be brought to the brink during the Winter of Discontent, she watched as European nations transitioned from dictatorship to democracy. She watched global COVID lockdowns. She watched the Euro debt crisis and a thousand other crises come and go.

In short, she saw political institutions far larger and more important than British membership of the EU rise and fall over her lifetime, and far more dramatically. She saw the UK join the EEC, she saw it transform into the EU and then she saw the UK leave it again. Of all the things she's seen and done, of all the life and death battles she witnessed or even took part in, EU related events were surely some of the less memorable and important, especially given the relatively imperceptible changes Brexit so far brought about.

If you really want to engage in speculation about the Queen's views on Brexit and the EU, consider this. I already said Churchill was one of only two Prime Ministers the Queen honored by attending their funeral. The other was Margaret Thatcher. Both had complex views on the merits of European integration, with both being positive in their earlier years but coming to regard it as a mistake in their later years.[1][2] Both were strongly committed throughout their lives to the strength and independence of the United Kingdom regardless of what Europe did.

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2639328

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-55454106

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dTal ◴[] No.32778595{5}[source]
Right, the Queen was (unsurprisingly given her privilege) a closet Tory and couldn't be relied upon to stop dirty Tory shenanigans. I don't think anyone was disagreeing? Not sure what the point of this comment was apart from to assert your opinion on Brexit.
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1. origin_path ◴[] No.32780343{6}[source]
> if the British parliament tried passing some truly terrible bill

> ... She passed the Brexit bill ...

> Of course she passed the Brexit bill

> not sure what the point of this comment was

It was to point out the absurdity of picking out this particular example given her long life and the many, many events and bills you could describe as 'terrible' along the way. If she was going to have broken her convention and tried to assert real power, that would be have a really odd one to pick.

BTW I didn't assert any opinion on Brexit itself, only that the level of hatred of it reached by some people is irrational.

> the Queen was ... a closet Tory

You don't actually know what the Queen's politics were. She lived through several Labour governments and never stopped their bills or expressed opinions on them either, that's just not the sort of monarch she was.