If you got rid of the monarchy, you would no longer be the United Kingdom. You would not be a kingdom of any kind, united or otherwise.

I do not mean for the above to be taken as a reason to not abolish the monarchy. But out of curiosity, what do you think you would be called if you did get rid of the monarchy?

Man, if only we had a different, equally recognisable name that isn't suggestive of a monarchy like...Great Britain?

(May 14, 2015 at 1:03 pm)Pyrrho Wrote: If you got rid of the monarchy, you would no longer be the United Kingdom. You would not be a kingdom of any kind, united or otherwise.

I do not mean for the above to be taken as a reason to not abolish the monarchy. But out of curiosity, what do you think you would be called if you did get rid of the monarchy?

Probably "The Republic of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" or words to that effect, just replacing the "United Kingdom" bit with "Republic" or whatever you replace the monarchy with.

What you'd call the country in every day conversation would be complicated, since the British Isles would technically have two separate republics (the Republic of Ireland, and the Republic of GB + Northern Ireland). Having said that, since "Great Britain" is often used as a description of the Union and not the island (for example, our Olympic Games team was called "Team GB"), I think you could shorten the full name of the country to "The Republic of Great Britain" with no problems. That way we could still use the initialism "GB" and even "GBR" (which we also currently use), and even "RGB" if we wanted.

You know, I never actually made the connection between UK and "kingdom". Wow! I just thought about it as its name.

This lurker is still trying to see how Brits will overthrow the monarchy without starting a revolution. Is that legally allowed?

Portugal abolished the monarchy back in 1910, but that was a time of crisis, tension and civil conflicts - The mentality was different and it was considered rational to implement a republic and even regicide one of the throne's heirs... But now we are all part of the EU, the British monarchy is basically a representation of stability and continuity present in British society (this is specially important because Absolutism and other kinds of extremism didn't flourish so often there) and a certain degree of conservatism is representative of the UK - When was the last time there was a coup'd État, a revolution, a drastic change of values that wasn't implemented progressively with a more conservative approach?

I just found out that conservatives only got 25% of the vote. They have a majority parliament with a quarter of the country behind them. This is a shit system. By some rough calculations they only got about 3 times as many votes as UKIP, who got 1 seat.