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Originally Posted by Chris

Not quite. They aren’t symbolic; they’re very real. They are, however, only exercised on advice (the conferring of the Order of Merit is an extremely rare exception). The monarch avoids a constitutional crisis by respecting a convention, not by obeying a law.

The powers of the sovereign have effectively been brought under democratic control because they are exercised by, or on the advice of, an Executive which is drawn from, and answerable to, our elected Parliament.

However, it is a delicious irony that our last line of defence against tyranny is that there is no law any government can usurp to give itself absolute power, because power has never been stripped from the Crown.

Parliament just beheaded it instead.