if parliament was, he said, ignoring the tripartite nature of parliament - the supreme authority of the nation being the monarch in parliament. if you think that a) the commons, b) the lords, and c) the monarch are ever going to allow the passage of a bill to remove the monarchy you're dafter than i thought. at the moment even the most minor discussion of the monarchy in the commons cannot, we're told, occur without the consent of the monarchy. and the heirs of mps like cromwell, michael livesey, and john okey cravenly abide by this restriction. things would have to change massively before shammer and his ilk would go against this convention let alone start to think of proposing a future without a monarchy. republican mp sir charles dilke was a minister in one of gladstone's administrations: it's an indictment of modern british politics that it is inconceivable now for a republican mp to other than on the backbenches.
if we look abroad for examples of the end of monarchy, it has either been after a referendum (italy, greece), by revolution (france, russia, china), and only very rarely by parliamentary means (first spanish republic, for example). and even then there have been several returns of the spanish monarchy, while the british monarchy famously returned after the republic and commonwealth - and then not only executed as many living regicides as they could, they also dug up and mutilated the corpses of those who had died. it'd be nice to suggest that this memory of what happened to their forebears was the only thing stopping the likes of shammer and davey proposing an end to the monarchy. but while they're too cowardly to bring forward the meekest motion on the monarchy nothing of any great extent can be expected of them.
the only way the monarchy has ever really become an issue has been through activities outside parliament, be it the tentative movements of republic or the bolder activities of the movement against the monarchy. but at the moment imo the wrong question's being asked, as in this statista survey
but even with this tepid question, more than a fifth of the population want to get rid of the monarchy. for my money getting rid of the monarchy is more likely to lead to, or result from, a more general systemic change in the uk than a simple transference of their role to some elected individual - something seismic would have to change for the lily-livered layabouts in parliament to face up to this greatest of constitutional questions.
Beauty may have changed for men too these last 600 years…
