Is a monarchy good for democracy?

[Donald Ian Rankin]

12. No-one suggests it's unpatriotic to criticise the prime minister.

One of the things that convinced me that our constitutional monarchy was a good thing was watching Republicans claiming that it was unpatriotic to be rude about George W Bush, because even if you didn't respect him you had a duty to respect the office of president.

I think that separating the jobs of "head of state who serves as a symbol of the nation and a focus of patriotism" and "person who actually runs the country and makes the decisions" works very well indeed.

And if you want to ensure that the former wields no actual power and no-one will suggest that you could, making the position hereditary is an even better way of depriving it of any kind of mandate than having it chosen by lottery.

Who the monarch actually is doesn't matter much - the majority of Britains, including me, and also including most republicans (small-r) have considerable respect for our current monarch, and that works fine; nearly everyone things that the next in line to the throne is a fat-headed idiot who talks to plants, and that will probably work fine. Their important duty is to be the person who employs the prime minister, so that it's clear that the country is being run by a glorified civil servant, and there's nothing unpatriotic about being rude about them.