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Comment by arethuza | Hacker News Reader

It's only very recently that I learned how odd the legal status of the City of London is - it's effectively a private corporation that has assumed the functions of a local authority. It is also the only place in the UK where businesses get to vote - businesses have 24,000 votes and actual residents only have 8,000 votes.

The actual amount of money controlled by the City of London Corporation isn't public either - e.g. there is the "City Cash" fund.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London_Corporation

My favourite bit of City trivia is that they have an official representative at Parliament, who gets to sit opposite the speaker - the wonderfully named Remembrancer.

[Edit: For some highly entertaining, if slightly paranoid, ranting about the City and the evils of offshore finance I can recommend "Treasure Islands" by Nicholas Shaxson - http://treasureislands.org/]

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The UK is weird when you start looking at "constitutional issues" (since it doesn't really have one). There are lots of "technicalities" which aren't true in practice. Like technically it has a state religion (Church of England), however it's quite secular as a country compared to many others. Technically the Queen has to approve and sign any law, but it's a rubber stamp, she can't refuse to sign an act. Technically Parliament can pass just about any law "that's not naturally impossible" (checks and balances? what's that?), but there are laws and other treaties, and the judges have some power etc.

"Church of England" - there is a hint in the name there, it is most certainly not a UK-wide state church.

Well it gets tricky here. The Queen is Supreme Governor of the Church of England, and the head of state of the UK (the Queen/King) has to take an oath to defend & uphold it (i.e. no catholics allowed to be monarch), though they are changing that.

There is also a Church of Ireland (which was disestablished as the offical religion of Ireland (which was in the UK) in 1870ish), and Church in Wales. Scotland has sorta it's own church (think it's a slight different variant) which it has a right to exist due to the Act of Union of 170x.

So it's all a bit complicated and depending on how you define "UK" and "UKwide"

I think the members of the Church of Scotland would object rather strongly to being described as a "slight different variant":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_Scotland

NB Although I've always been an atheist, I grew up in a small community in the North of Scotland dominated by the Kirk and it's more zealous offshoots. If you've seen Lars von Triers "Breaking the Waves" then you'll get the idea.... :-)

> it's a rubber stamp, she can't refuse to sign an act

Funny - in Australia and New Zealand we have Governors General to represent the Queen, and they're also given the final say on whether a law is passed. In New Zealand the people I've talked to have considered it purely ceremonial, but in Australia 1975 that viewpoint was refuted when the governor general dissolved the parliament.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kerr_(governor-general) for more.

Well technically the Monarch and Parliament have disagreed in the past, but there was a civil war over it (Parliament won). So it's tricky how they would settle it now. Though Parliament (in UK) has the right to depose the monarch and get someone else in (Glorious Revolution, where they got rid of the Catholics), so if the queen refused to sign a law, they'd get someone else in.

The monarch can refuse to sign legislation. However the refusal to sign would trigger the dismantling of the monarchy plunging the UK into a deep constitutional crisis not seen since Oliver Cromwell.

And while technically the House of Commons can pass just about any law it wants, the House of Lords generally acts as a counterweight to reign in worst of the Commons. Usually if its not in the governments manifesto and the bill gets kicked back to the Commons then by convention its usually kicked into the long grass unless the changes proposed by the Lords are acceptable.

Of course the Commons could invoke the Parliament Act to push through legislation it generally only does so in rare circumstances (a handful over the last century). However any attempt to do this over anything other than a firm manifesto pledge would likely again plunge the UK into said constitutional crisis.

So the checks and balances in the UK system come from the fact none of parties involved wants to deal with the mess that would result if they didn't follow prior convention.

There's also the EU, which (particularly with the EU Bill of Human Rights) acts more and more as a reasonably sane constitution for the UK.

EU Bill of Human Rights

Don't you mean "Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union"?

This really is the biggest non-story of all time, being that virtually no-one actually lives in the City, and the decisions that the Corporation make relate mostly to boring municipal stuff.

I stopped reading Reddit about the time the entirety of r/uk was threatening to occupy twitter or something about this. Please don't bring it here too.

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