Potential UK General Election Late 2016 / Early 2017

[DL]

What happens to UKIP now? Do they surge Asa result of getting their way in the referendum? Or does their support evaporate because people have had the catharsis of getting a Leave victory in the referendum and if the new Tory leader is a pro-Leave guy like Johnson...doesn't that leave UKIP with no raison d'etre?

[DL]

Isn't the Fixed Term Election act just symbolic? If the PM asks the queen to dissolve parliament doesn't she have to agree?

[DL]

Again, pardon me for being persistent but doesn't the Queen always have to follow the advice of her PM? What if May simply goes to the Queen and says "I request that your majesty dissolve parliament"?

We went through this in Canada. In 2006 the Harper Conservatives passed the "fixed elections act" stating that elections were to be every four years unless parliament voted no confidence in a minority government. In August 2008 Harper decided that he wanted to call a snap early election to try to get a majority. He simply went to the Governor General and requested a dissolution and he got it! The courts subsequently ruled that the Fixed Term law was only symbolic and that nothing could stand in the way of a PM being the only person who could give advice to the crown. Why would it be any different in the UK? The crown is the crown!

[DL]

I have looked at the Canadian law about fixed term elections. It inserts an explicit provision in the Canada Elections Act regarding the power of the Governor General to dissolve Parliament.

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There is nothing remotely comparable to the Canadian provision in the UK legislation.

I believe that language was inserted because it was so obvious. Under our constitutional monarchy there is no way short of a constitutional amendment for parliament to pass a law that affects the reserve powers of the crown. Of course one thing that is different in the UK is the fact that there is no written constitution in the first place.

What if Theresa May simply used her majority to repeal the Fixed Term Elections act and THEN asked the queen for a dissolution?

[DL]

Probably one big difference between the UK and Canada is that in the UK the monarch is the queen herself and she is there for life and has 1000 history behind her. In Canada the Governor General is invariably some useless flunky appointed by the PM as a pay off. When the PM of Canada tells the Governor General to "jump" the GG says "how high?" In contrast if the PM of Great Britain asked the queen to do something that clearly contravened the law, she would just say NO