Progress Is A Dirty Word

The End of a 1,000-Year Dictatorship - or the Beginning of a New One?
To the casual observer, the United Kingdom looks like a democracy. So do most of the more than 60 current and former colonies that have adopted "English common law" into their respective constitutions.
In reality, though, the United Kingdom is a dictatorship. Furthermore, any country that has inherited its law, and not later amended or renounced it, is a dictatorship as well. A benign dictatorship in most cases, but a dictatorship nonetheless. The U.S. declared independence against this dictatorship more than 200 years ago. And fundamentally, little has changed since that era.
Calling the United Kingdom a dictatorship may sound like an extreme statement. But it's not once you understand that the executive, elected officials and the courts are unified in a single organ, the crown.
The crown isn't a person or a family, but a bureaucracy. Its most visible symbol is the reigning Windsor monarch (currently Queen Elizabeth). Neither the legislature nor the courts exist independently of the crown.
In those jurisdictions that remain U.K. colonies (now called overseas territories), the powers of the crown apply just as strongly as they did when they were first colonized. Anytime the United Kingdom can't force its overseas territories to do its bidding - say to weaken financial secrecy laws, raise taxes or cooperate in foreign tax investigations, the U.K. Foreign Office can bring legislation into effect in overseas territories on its own. It's definitely happened before.
Now, the crown itself, "by Command of Her Majesty," is suggesting that some of its powers be turned over to Parliament. But even should these changes be placed in effect, there will still be no true separation of powers, because all authority will be rooted in Parliament. The U.K. courts, for instance, cannot overrule an act of Parliament. The authority of the United Kingdom to enact laws over the head of elected representatives in its overseas territories will be unaffected.
The only difference will be that the U.K. Parliament (rather than the crown) will wield these powers. Instead of a dictatorship by a potentially enlightened executive, the United Kingdom will have mob rule, in the form of a democracy, which can enact laws that can't be overruled by the courts.
The slide into a police state that is already underway in the United Kingdom - mandatory national ID cards, the highest concentration of closed circuit television cameras in the world, etc. - won't be affected by this proposal. Indeed, any moderating influence the reigning monarch might have on the adoption of similar laws would be lessened. Is this really progress?