Are you a British citizen? If so — and you have no other nationality — then you have no right to a passport. That was confirmed by the then home secretary nearly 10 years ago. Theresa May said:
There is no entitlement to a passport and no statutory right to have access to a passport. The decision to issue, withdraw, or refuse a British passport is at the discretion of the secretary of state for the home department (the home secretary) under the royal prerogative.
What’s that?
Some prerogative powers — of great importance in recent years — are exercised by the King himself.
Others prerogative powers — issuing passports, for example — are in the hands of ministers.
Robert Hazell CBE, professor of government and the constitution at University College London, has co-authored a masterly new book with Timothy Foot explaining what prerogative powers are and why they matter. Executive Power: The Prerogative, Past, Present and Future is published by Hart Publishing, an imprint of Bloomsbury, at £85.
If 350 pages is a bit beyond you, then you can download this free 60-page summary. Or you can read Hazell’s concise blog.
You can also watch this discussion:
or listen to the audio version.
Best of all, why not start with my column in today’s Law Society Gazette? It concentrates on prerogative powers to make public appointments. Until the Constitutional Reform Act 2005 came into force, that’s how judges were appointed. Ministers have relatively little involvement, but perhaps not quite as little as you might think.
Hazell argues that we have gone too far and that ministers should have more of a say in appointing top judges. That’s the proposition I have written about.
To read my column in the Gazette, click here, click the page numbers in the middle of the banner at the top of the page, navigate to page 10, click the icon for “single page” to the left of the page numbers and click the “page fill” icon to the left.