Alternative for the Realm

Alternative for the Realm, ordinarily AfR, is a right-populist party of the United Kingdom of America and the newest of the Realm’s six federal parties. It was founded in 2016 by members and organisers who left the Conservative and Crown Union, and it holds 62 of 460 seats in the House of Commons. It has never formed a ministry, never held office in any polity, and is excluded from coalition by every other federal party, which is how it came to be the Official Opposition without winning anything.

Its central claim is constitutional rather than economic. AfR argues that the Realm’s sovereignty rests in the Crown, that Parliament, the courts and the party system have progressively appropriated what belongs to the sovereign, and that the remedy is for the Crown to act: to refuse assent, to withhold commissions, to use the reserve powers that constitutional practice has left dormant for a century. It describes itself as the only party loyal to the Realm as the Charter actually constituted it, and its opponents as a political class that has hollowed out the monarchy while professing to revere it.

This makes AfR a difficulty of an unusual kind. The Realm has faced republican movements before and answered them easily. It has no settled answer to a party that demands the Crown be more than it is, because every instrument for refusing that demand requires the Crown to take a political position, which is the one thing the Crown may not do. AfR’s opponents call this the party’s real programme: not to be granted what it asks, but to be refused, so that the refusal can be presented as proof.

The party is led by Dale Ambrister, a former talk-radio broadcaster who founded it and has never faced a leadership contest. For twelve years he led it as a party of grievance. In October 2028, in the space of a single morning, he accepted a unanimous judgment of the Royal American Supreme Court against a case brought in his own name and declined to argue with the King’s question about abdicating, and the party has not yet decided whether its leader has changed his mind about what it is for. A part of its base believes he has, and resents it.

Name

The name is a claim about what the Realm’s politics has ceased to offer. AfR’s founding statement argued that the Commons contained five parties and one settlement, that the differences between them were differences of administration rather than of constitution, and that a voter who thought the settlement itself was wrong had nowhere to go. The party proposed itself as the alternative to that agreement, and the phrase for the Realm is the load-bearing half: the alternative is offered in the Realm’s name and in the Crown’s, not against them.

Opponents read the name differently. The Realm is not an abstraction with interests separate from its Parliament, they argue, and a party claiming to speak for it over the heads of the institutions that constitute it has conceded the essential point. The Conservative and Crown Union, which lost the members who founded AfR, is the most persistent maker of this argument and the least well placed to make it.

The abbreviation AfR is universal, including in the party’s own material. The lower-case f is deliberate and is preserved in parliamentary records. The party’s founders chose it, according to Ambrister’s own account, because they did not want the preposition to look as important as the nouns on either side of it, and because a capital F would have made the three letters look like a government department.

History

The western tendency

AfR’s origins lie inside the CCU. The western and free-enterprise tendency organised by Barry Goldwater after his leadership victory of 1963 was a permanent feature of that party thereafter, holding a clear programme of lower taxation, polity autonomy, defence and the narrowest reading of the American Rights Act consistent with obeying it. It won leaderships and it won pluralities. It did not, in the judgment of those who eventually left, ever win the argument inside its own party.

The grievance was specific. In 1964 the CCU became the largest party in the Commons and declined the premiership; from 1952 it had governed by accepting the welfare settlement it opposed; and after 2012 it lost two consecutive elections under a northeastern moderniser without changing its position on anything its western members regarded as fundamental. The complaint was not that the CCU held the wrong views but that holding them had never once been made to matter.

The grievance acquired its constitutional form in the 2000s, through the security settlement that followed the May Day Bombings of 2006 and through the steady growth of the Rights Act’s economic reading in the courts. The western tendency had always believed that the federation did too much; it came to believe, in the years after May Day, that the federation did it without anybody’s consent, by emergency statute and judicial doctrine, and that the one institution in the constitution which had not consented, and could not be made to, was the Crown. The argument was made first in the interior’s talk radio, and one of the people making it was Ambrister.

Ambrister

Dale Ambrister was born on the Western Slope of Colorado and spent fifteen years as a regional radio broadcaster, the voice of a three-hour morning programme of politics, agriculture prices and listeners’ telephone calls that was carried by stations from Grand Junction to the Wyoming border. He was a fluent, unhurried and funny broadcaster with a gift for making a constitutional grievance sound like common sense, and his programme built, over a decade, an audience that trusted him more than it trusted any member of Parliament.

Ambrister was never a lawyer, a soldier or an official, and he has never pretended to constitutional learning; his doctrine came to him, by his own account, from his listeners, who telephoned his programme for a decade to ask why nobody had voted for the things that were being done to them, and from the Charter of Union, which he read for the first time in his forties and has quoted ever since, accurately, from memory. He is married, lives in the constituency he represents, attends a Methodist church there when the Commons is not sitting, and has never given an interview about his family.

He was elected to the Commons as a Conservative at the general election of 2012, for an interior constituency in the Free State of Colorado, and spent four years on the CCU’s back benches in a parliamentary party led by Daniel Thayer, a northeastern moderniser whose strategy was to make the party acceptable to the professional suburbs. Ambrister regarded the strategy as surrender and said so on the radio programmes he still gave interviews to. The CCU whips regarded him as a broadcaster who happened to sit in the Commons. Both were partly right.

Foundation, 2016

The party was constituted in 2016 by a group of CCU members, organisers and two sitting members of the Commons, led by Ambrister and joined by Ray Haskett, the Conservative member for a seat in the State of Wyoming. The founding convention met in Denver in the spring of 2016, in the fourth year of the first LSDP ministry after the CCU’s fall from office, and its declaration made three claims: that the constitutional settlement had been altered without amendment, that the alteration had been made by courts rather than by Parliament, and that the Crown had been left a spectator at the dismantling of its own prerogative.

The declaration’s last phrase gave the party its sense of itself. AfR’s members speak of the Crown as a spectator in the way other parties speak of their founding grievances: the King watching from the gallery while Parliament and the courts rearranged his constitution, unable to object because the conventions forbade it, and waiting for somebody to say so on his behalf. The image is not one the Palace has ever endorsed, and the party has never claimed that it has.

The CCU’s response was to treat the departure as small and terminal. It was neither. AfR contested its first general election, in 2018, with a national list of candidates and organisation in the interior polities that its founders had built inside the CCU and took with them, and it won 27 seats, most of them top-up seats awarded under the best-loser rule in polities where its candidates had run close behind the CCU’s.

The first campaign, 2018

The campaign of 2018 was Ambrister’s, and it was fought as no federal campaign had been fought before. The party had no money to speak of, no organisation outside the interior polities and two members of Parliament, and it had a leader who could talk to a million people every morning. Ambrister gave up his radio programme when he founded the party, as the broadcasting rules required, and spent two years touring the interior and the Gulf, speaking in county fairgrounds, high-school gymnasiums and the car parks of feed stores, and recording a weekly address that the interior’s stations carried as paid political broadcasting and its listeners passed round.

The party’s candidates were not, for the most part, politicians. They were ranchers, small-business owners, retired soldiers, sheriffs’ deputies, ministers of religion and a good number of people who had telephoned Ambrister’s programme and been asked whether they would stand. The national list was assembled in a fortnight, and the party’s critics found in it, within a week, enough unwise remarks on enough subjects to fill several newspapers. The party withdrew none of its candidates and apologised for none of the remarks, and its vote went up.

The result surprised everybody except the party. AfR won twenty-seven seats, a handful outright in the interior and most of them from the top-up, where the best-loser rule awarded the polities’ additional seats to its candidates who had come second to the CCU by small margins. It took more than a tenth of the vote in seven polities and more than a fifth in two, and it cost the CCU, by the CCU’s own reckoning, at least a dozen constituencies that its vote had split. Thayer resigned the CCU leadership within the month.

Growth, 2018 to 2028

AfR’s growth has been steady rather than dramatic and has come almost entirely at the CCU’s expense. It draws from the outer suburbs of the growing polities, the interior west, the Gulf, and from voters who had previously not voted at all, a group the party’s own organisers regard as its real achievement and its opponents as its most troubling one.

The general election of 2018 was the CCU’s last under Thayer, and the CCU’s answer to AfR’s first result was to elect Wade Corrigan of Idaho, a western leader who argued that the party had lost its voters by apologising for them and moved it to the right. Corrigan’s leadership was AfR’s greatest danger and its best recruiting sergeant: it took back some of the interior and lost the suburbs, and it confirmed AfR’s argument that the CCU would move only when frightened. At the general election of 2023 AfR rose to 35 seats while the CCU gained nine, and Corrigan resigned two years later.

In the Commons, AfR behaved for ten years as a party that expected to be ignored and meant to be heard. It held no committee chairmanships, which go by agreement among the parties and were never offered to it, and it used the procedures that belong to every member: private members’ bills, adjournment debates, written questions and divisions. Its members tabled a bill to repeal the post-May Day security powers in every session from 2018, and a motion calling on the Governor-General to explain her refusals to act in most of them, and they forced divisions on both, which they lost by enormous margins and published in the interior’s newspapers as proof of the settlement at work. They voted against the purchase of Loreto in 2027 to a member, and against every measure of the Valdez ministry that relied on Part VI of the Nationality Act.

The other parties’ members learned to manage AfR rather than answer it. Its speeches were heard, its divisions taken, its bills talked out, and its members treated with the careful courtesy that the Commons extends to people it would rather not have to deal with. Ambrister, who had been a broadcaster for fifteen years, understood the strategy better than the people pursuing it, and turned it into the party’s best material: every unanswered question, every talked-out bill, every refusal by a Governor-General to explain a refusal became an item on his weekly broadcast, and his listeners heard the political class ignoring them every week.

The general election of 2023 was the test of whether AfR could survive a CCU that had moved to meet it, and it passed. Corrigan’s CCU fought on the Rights Act, federal regulation and the borders, in terms closer to AfR’s than any CCU leader had used, and AfR’s answer was that the voters should prefer the original to the copy and that a CCU which had moved right because it was frightened would move back as soon as it was not. Its vote rose in every interior polity, its seats rose to thirty-five, and the CCU, which had expected to win, finished behind a Labour minority. The result settled for a decade the question the CCU’s western associations had been asking since 2016, whether AfR could be absorbed by imitation, and it settled it in AfR’s favour.

Through those years the party grew its membership slowly, its vote quickly, and its parliamentary group not at all in experience: its members of Parliament were almost all first-term members, many had never held any office, and a good number had been listeners to Ambrister’s programme before they were candidates for his party. Its parliamentary presence was for twelve years small enough to make its exclusion costless.

The Loreto division and the 2028 election

The opportunity came from Loreto. AfR had opposed the purchase of the Baja peninsula in 2027 and had objected from the first to the territory’s five seats in the Commons, which rested on a Mexican census of Mexican citizens taken before the transfer, no federal enumeration having been made. When the Valdez ministry fell on 26 July 2028 by 229 votes to 230, with the five members for Loreto voting against it, AfR’s members voted with the Opposition and its leader said that night that a government of the Realm had been brought down by five votes whose foundation was before the courts. He was right that the question was before the courts, and the remark was the most quoted thing he said all summer.

The six weeks between the division and the general election were the best campaign AfR has fought. Its message wrote itself: a government had fallen on five votes from a territory nobody had counted, the courts had refused to say whether those votes were lawful until after the election, and the five parties that had bought the territory, run it under an Act that said it was not a permanent settlement, and then fallen out over it were asking the electorate to choose among them. Ambrister fought the campaign under the party’s standing slogan and a new one, “Count first”, painted on the side of the bus he toured the interior in, and his rallies in the outer suburbs of the Texas and Florida cities were the largest any party held that summer.

The party’s opponents fought the campaign against one another. Labour lost seats to the Bloc in the cities over Loreto; the LFD and the Greens were punished for having been in the coalition; the CCU, which had moved the motion that started the election, spent the campaign explaining that it would not govern with AfR, which was not the question most of AfR’s voters were asking. AfR gained more than any other party except the Bloc, and it gained almost everywhere it stood.

The general election of 7 September 2028 nearly doubled the party, to 62 seats. The Commons returned in September 2028 answered the question of what AfR’s exclusion would cost, and did not answer it in the party’s favour: the five parties it had spent a decade being shut out by shut it out again, this time by forming a government together rather than by refusing to. The CCU and AfR together held 230 seats, three short of the 233 a majority required, so that breaking the cordon would not have produced a government either. The exclusion held. What it cost was the Opposition, which AfR now leads: the largest party not in the ministry is the Official Opposition, and AfR was the only party not in it.

The King’s illness

AfR became the Official Opposition on 11 September 2028, and fourteen days later the aircraft carrying Ernest V from London to Ottawa was lost east of Newfoundland. The weeks that followed tested every party in the Realm and AfR more than any: the party that had spent twelve years saying the Crown should act found itself in a Realm in which the Crown could not act at all, its King missing and then gravely injured and its powers exercised by a Regent, the Queen, from 30 September.

AfR’s conduct through those weeks was more restrained than its opponents had expected and than some of its members wanted. On 26 September, when Lord Whitlock became the first Prime Minister to answer at the bar of the House of Commons and the House, on his proposal, referred to the law officers the question whether anything arising from the loss of the aircraft engaged Article II.8 of the Charter, the question of the succession, AfR voted with the other five parties. It said nothing about the regency that the other parties did not say, and it asked the Governor-General for nothing.

On 20 October the King woke. That afternoon Whitlock told the Lords, and then the Commons at the bar, that the reference stayed open, because the question survived the King’s survival. The first question was the Leader of the Opposition’s: Ambrister asked whether, now that the King was awake, the government would withdraw the reference and stop asking the law officers about the succession to a King who was alive. The Prime Minister said that it was not the government’s reference but the House’s, and that he would not ask the House to withdraw a question because it had become less frightening. Ambrister said that the Prime Minister had been in office for under six weeks and had spent most of them on the King. The Prime Minister said that that was true. It was the first exchange between them that either party’s members remember, and the Commons, which had expected a confrontation, heard a conversation.

Ambrister’s October

AfR had brought its challenge to the Loreto seats in its leader’s name, as Ambrister v Attorney-General for America, arguing that the five seats rested on a census taken by another country of its own citizens before the peninsula changed hands and were therefore no seats at all. The Court had refused on 25 August to hear the case before the general election, three Justices saying in twenty minutes that a constitutional question does not become more urgent because a government has fallen on it. It was argued over two days on 10 and 11 October, and on 25 October 2028 the seven Justices held the seats valid, unanimously, and went further than the case needed to hold that every vote cast from them had been lawfully cast and counted, naming the division of 26 July. The Chief Justice’s summary contained the sentence “A seat is not less a seat because the vote cast from it was decisive.”

Ambrister was at counsel’s table when the summary was read and did not move. At a quarter past twelve he came down the steps of the Court on his own, without the party’s people round him, and spoke for about a minute: “The Court has said what Parliament did, and Parliament did it. We accept that. We have always said that the courts should not take Parliament’s place, and today the Court has said that it will not. If those seats are to change, Parliament is the place to ask, and we will ask it there.” Asked whether the party still regarded the division of 26 July as illegitimate, he said that the Court had answered that and that he did not argue with a court that had told him to argue with Parliament.

The same day the King, Ernest V, asked his Private Secretary to find out what an abdication would require in each of his realms. Ambrister was asked that afternoon whether the party, which had always said the Crown should act, would urge the King not to go. He said: “His Majesty asked a question. A loyal subject answers a King’s question. He does not argue with it.” He said that whatever the King decided, the party would accept it, and he would not be drawn further.

The two statements surprised everybody who heard them, and the ABC’s presenter told the national audience so on air. They were the most constitutionally orthodox things the leader of AfR had ever said, and they were said on the day the party might have been expected to say the opposite: that the Court had usurped Parliament by blessing the seats, and that the King should be urged to stay and use his powers. Ambrister has never explained them, and when he was asked in the Commons whether he had changed his mind about anything, he said that he had always believed the courts should defer to Parliament, and that he had been taken at his word.

The abdication and the new reign

When the abdication of Ernest V came before the Commons on 31 October, AfR took it with the other five parties. The bill passed all its stages without a division, and AfR’s members neither forced one nor objected by voice, and Ambrister’s statement that day could have been issued by any of the six. His son, the fifteen-year-old George V, became King at two in the afternoon, with Queen Christina as Regent until his sixteenth birthday.

The new reign has put AfR’s doctrine in a position its founders never imagined. The party asks the Crown to act, and the Crown is now exercised by a Regent on behalf of a boy at school; the reserve powers are the Governor-General’s, as they were, and the King himself will not take his oaths until May. AfR has said nothing about what its demand means under a regency. Its critics say that the party has discovered it cannot ask a boy of fifteen to defy his ministers and cannot ask his mother to do it for him. Its leadership says that the question does not arise, because the party has never asked any sovereign to do anything, only pointed out what any sovereign could do.

Doctrine

The Crown and the reserve powers

AfR’s constitutional position is that the Crown’s powers are real, that their disuse is a convention rather than a law, and that a convention which has emptied an institution of function has been observed for too long. It calls on the sovereign to refuse assent to legislation that alters the constitutional settlement, to decline commissions to ministries it regards as constitutionally illegitimate, and to use the Governor-General’s reserve powers on more than the two occasions in the Realm’s history when they have been exercised.

The party is careful, in its formal documents, never to say that the Crown would agree with it. It says only that the Crown could act and does not. The distinction is what keeps the position inside the law, and its opponents regard it as a fig leaf.

The doctrine has a history the party prefers not to dwell on. Its founders were Conservatives, members of the party whose constitution requires its conventions to close with the royal anthem and which treats any suggestion that the Crown favours it as a disciplinary matter. AfR inverted the CCU’s Crown doctrine rather than abandoning it: where the CCU holds that the Crown’s value lies in standing above the contest, AfR holds that the contest has been rigged and that the Crown’s duty is to step into it. The two parties quote the same constitutional writers at each other, often the same passages.

The courts and Parliament

The party’s second doctrine is that the courts have taken Parliament’s place. Its founding declaration’s charge was that the settlement had been altered without amendment, by judgment, and its programme has always contained a list of judgments it would reverse by statute. The doctrine sits uneasily with the first, since a party that wants the Crown to act against Parliament also wants Parliament to act against the courts, and the tension was never resolved until October 2028, when Ambrister resolved it in one direction outside the Supreme Court. If the courts should defer to Parliament, the Loreto judgment was the Court deferring, and AfR accepted it. Whether the same logic applies to the Crown, which the party wants to act against Parliament, Ambrister has not said.

The Rights Act

AfR is the only federal party that proposes to reverse the economic reading of the American Rights Act. It argues that the enforceable duties to health, housing, schooling and water were invented by judges from a civil-status statute, that “reasonable progressive fulfilment” has given courts a supervisory role over public spending which no Parliament ever conferred, and that the doctrine should be undone by legislation. Its position is not repeal of the Act, which it says it supports in its original meaning, but repeal of what the courts have made of it.

The distinction between the two is disputed by every other party, and by most constitutional lawyers, on the ground that the Act’s meaning after a century and a half of judgment is the Act.

Loreto

AfR’s position on Loreto is that the territory’s future should be settled by the whole Realm, after the Realm has counted it. It wants a federal enumeration of the territory before anything else, which the Heads of Agreement require in any case, and then a referendum of the whole Realm on the territory’s constitutional form, before Parliament legislates. It will vote against any Bill that settles the territory’s form before both have happened, and it has said so.

The party insists that it opposes the timing and not the people. Its literature says that the four million people of Loreto are the Realm’s subjects, bought with the Realm’s money, and that they deserve a settlement the Realm has agreed to rather than one five parties have agreed among themselves. Its critics point out that the referendum it proposes would let the rest of the Realm decide the status of people who would have no vote in it, and that the party which opposed the purchase now proposes a procedure that would delay their enfranchisement by years. AfR’s answer is that the people of the Realm bought the territory and should decide what they bought it for, which its opponents regard as the party’s whole position on Loreto in one sentence.

Federation, borders and security

Beyond the constitutional programme, AfR holds a familiar set of positions: maximum polity autonomy, minimum federal administration, strict border and immigration enforcement, and the repeal of the security powers taken after the May Day Bombings of 2006, which it regards as permanent federal authority acquired under emergency cover. The last of these is the one position it shares with parties of the left, and the shared ground has never produced cooperation.

The security powers are the position on which AfR has been most consistent and least noticed. The party’s founders were Conservatives who had supported McCain’s emergency government in 2006 and had watched, through the Obama years, the powers it took survive the emergency they were taken for. Their view, which AfR has held from its founding, is that a power taken by statute in an emergency and kept after the emergency is a power taken without consent, and that the Security of the Realm Act is the clearest example in the Realm’s law of the political class acquiring authority by a route the electorate never approved. The party has tabled a bill to repeal it in every session since 2018. Labour’s left and the Bloc have said much the same thing, at the same time and in the same chamber, and the three have never voted together on it, because each regards the others’ company as worse than the Act.

On borders and immigration the party’s position is the interior’s. It wants the federal border enforced more strictly than any government has enforced it, the naturalisation process slowed and made harder, and the federal government’s discretion to admit people outside the ordinary routes curtailed. The position predates Loreto and was sharpened by it: the territory’s four million people became subjects without the ordinary process, under an Act the party regards as the largest grant of the Realm’s status in its history made without a vote of the Realm. AfR’s critics observe that the party’s border policy and its Loreto policy have the same object; the party replies that both have the same principle, which is that the Realm’s people should decide who joins them.

On the economy it is less distinctive than its opponents assume. It wants lower federal taxation and less federal regulation, as the CCU’s western tendency always has; it supports the public trusts, which its interior voters use; and it has no position on the welfare settlement beyond its objection to the Rights Act’s judicial extension. Its programme for government, so far as it has one, is the CCU’s western programme with the constitutional demand added, and its critics say that without the demand it would be a faction.

The Crown’s difficulty

The monarchy’s problem with AfR is not that the party opposes it. Every institution can survive opposition. The problem is that AfR defends the Crown loudly, in terms the Crown cannot accept, and there is no way for the Crown to say so.

A sovereign who publicly repudiated AfR’s constitutional programme would be taking a position against a party sitting in the Commons, which is precisely the partisanship the Realm’s whole practice is built to prevent. A sovereign who says nothing is quoted as consenting. Ernest V followed the second course throughout his reign, and the Palace confined itself to restating the ordinary doctrine of the constitutional monarchy without naming anyone, which AfR reproduced in its own literature as evidence that the Crown had not disagreed. The Regent and the young King have said nothing at all, and AfR has not quoted the silence.

Governor-General Michelle Lujan Grisham has been the more frequent target, because the reserve powers are hers to exercise and her refusals are therefore concrete. AfR has demanded intervention on several occasions since her commission in 2022, and made the same demands of her predecessors before that, and has been declined each time without published reasons, in accordance with the convention that the Governor-General does not explain a decision not to act. The party’s most recent demand, that she refuse the dissolution Valdez asked for in July 2028 and commission a ministry from the existing Commons, was declined the same evening, and was the last such demand the party has made.

The Realm’s constitutional writers have generally concluded that there is no solution available, only a practice: that the Crown continues as it has, that the demand goes unanswered, and that the party is denied the confrontation it seeks. Whether a practice of that kind survives a party large enough to hold the balance of power has not been tested, and the Commons of 2028, in which AfR is large and holds no balance at all, has postponed the test.

The cordon

All five other federal parties have undertaken not to enter coalition with AfR, nor to depend on its votes for confidence or supply. The undertaking is explicit and has been restated at each general election since 2018.

The rule holds. Its cost has fallen almost entirely on the CCU, which needs AfR’s voters to form a government and is forbidden its seats, and which must therefore ask the same electorate for support while refusing the party that electorate has chosen. The CCU has never wavered on it. No CCU leader, association or faction has argued in public for ending it, the party’s October convention did not debate it, and the western associations, which have lost more members to AfR than the rest of the CCU combined, are the loudest voices inside the CCU for holding it.

The Commons of 2028 made the rule’s cost visible and then made it irrelevant. The CCU and AfR together held 230 seats, three short of a majority, so that the cordon did not stand between the CCU and the premiership; the arithmetic did. The five parties then formed a government together rather than refusing to, and the cordon, which had for a decade been a promise about what the other parties would not do, became a ministry that every party but AfR was in.

AfR’s own position on the cordon is that it proves the case. A settlement that excludes a party by agreement among its rivals, the argument runs, is the same settlement that excluded the electorate from the constitutional changes made by the courts. Ambrister calls the Whitlock ministry “the cordon with a Cabinet”, and the ABC, which reported the commissioning, used almost the same phrase, a coincidence AfR mentions often.

Organisation

The leader

AfR has had one leader, and its constitution makes no provision for replacing him. The founding convention of 2016 elected Ambrister by acclamation and adopted a constitution under which the leader holds office until he resigns or the National Convention removes him by a two-thirds vote, and no motion to remove him has ever been tabled. The party has never adopted the membership-ballot leadership procedure that the CCU has used since 1963, and its critics observe that a party which demands the Crown use its powers has never given its own members theirs.

The leader appoints the party’s officers, chairs its national committee and speaks for it on everything. In practice he does more than that: he writes most of its literature, records a weekly broadcast that the party distributes online and on the interior’s radio stations, and answers, in the Commons, for every subject on which the Opposition speaks.

The National Convention

The party meets each June in a National Convention, held in Denver every year since the founding, a gathering of a few thousand members which adopts the programme, elects the national committee and hears the leader. It is the largest political meeting in the interior west and the most carefully organised, and it has never voted against a motion the leadership supported.

Membership and money

AfR has about 60,000 members, small relative to its vote, which ran into the millions when it won its 62 seats. The disproportion is the party’s most distinctive organisational fact: its voters are numerous, young and attached to Ambrister, and few of them have joined anything. Its money comes from small donations, raised mostly through the leader’s broadcasts, and from a number of large donors in the interior and the Gulf, whose names the party publishes as the law requires and whose interests its opponents have spent a good deal of effort trying to connect to its programme.

The national office is in Denver, in a former bank building on the edge of the city that the party bought in 2019 and in which its founding declaration is displayed, framed, in the lobby. It has no office in New Westminster beyond the Opposition’s rooms in the Parliament building, which it occupied for the first time in September 2028.

Factions

Until October 2028 AfR had no factions anybody outside it could name. Its members agreed with their leader, its programme was his, and its arguments were with everybody else. Ambrister’s October created the party’s first internal division.

The leadership’s side holds that Ambrister has done what a leader of the Opposition must do: accept the judgments of the courts, respect the Crown’s decisions, and show the electorate that AfR could be trusted with office. Its members are mostly the party’s newer members of Parliament, elected in 2023 and 2028 from the outer suburbs, who expect to fight their next elections against the CCU for voters who want a credible alternative government and not only a grievance.

The other side calls itself, after the founding document, the Declaration members. They are the party’s founders and its interior heartland, and they hold that the party exists to make the constitutional demand and that its leader, by accepting the Loreto judgment and declining to urge the King to stay, has abandoned it on the two occasions in twelve years when the demand might have mattered. Their most prominent voice is Cody Varner, a member for a seat in the Republic of Texas elected in 2023, who said after the Court’s judgment that “the Court told us to go and argue with Parliament, and our leader said thank you.” About a dozen of the party’s members of Parliament are counted with him. They have not challenged Ambrister, whom the constitution makes almost impossible to challenge, and they have not left. They want the old line back.

AfR in the polities

AfR has never held office in any polity, and its polity organisations are, almost everywhere, the Opposition’s Opposition: the third or fourth party in legislatures where the CCU governs or leads the opposition, and excluded from coalition by every other party in the polity as it is in the federation. The cordon is a federal undertaking, and the polity parties have adopted it on their own account in every polity where AfR has seats, including the interior polities where the CCU’s local associations have most to lose by it.

Its polity strength is where its federal strength is. It holds seats in the legislatures of the Free State of Colorado, the State of Wyoming, the State of Idaho, the Republic of Texas, the State of Oklahoma-Sequoyah and the Republic of Florida, and in Colorado and Wyoming it is the second party in the legislature by seats. Its polity members are, if anything, less interested in the constitutional demand than its federal ones; their programmes are about water, land, roads and taxes, and their speeches about the federation, and they have been the party’s most effective recruiters, because they are the AfR members whom voters actually meet.

The case against AfR

The other parties’ case against AfR is made in several registers, and the party’s opponents do not always agree among themselves about which matters most.

The constitutional case is the one the CCU makes most often: that a party which asks the Crown to act against Parliament is asking the monarchy to destroy itself, since a Crown that acted politically once would be a party to every political argument afterwards, and that AfR’s loyalty to the Crown is the kind of loyalty that would kill what it loves. The Realm’s constitutional writers have mostly agreed with this, and AfR’s answer, that a Crown which never acts has already been destroyed and merely not buried, has not persuaded many of them.

The democratic case is Labour’s and the LFD’s: that a party which wants the Crown to override elected ministries wants the electorate overridden, whatever it says about speaking for the electorate, and that AfR’s constitution, which gives its own members no vote on their leader, shows what it thinks of votes. The party’s answer is that the electorate has never been asked about the constitutional changes made by the courts, and that it is AfR which wants it asked.

The third case is about Loreto and the people of Loreto, and it is the one the party resents most. The Realm’s purchase of the peninsula was followed by eighteen months of racial abuse directed at Valdez from more than one direction, which produced two prosecutions and two convictions, and AfR’s opponents have never quite separated the party’s objections to the purchase from the abuse that accompanied it. The party has always said that the abuse had nothing to do with it, that none of the people convicted was a member, and that it opposed the purchase on grounds of cost, constitution and consent; its opponents reply that a party which proposes to let the rest of the Realm vote on the status of four million people who would have no vote themselves has made its own position plain enough. The argument has not been settled, and AfR’s proposal of a Realm-wide referendum has kept it alive.

Electoral support

AfR is strongest in the interior west, on the Gulf, and in the outer suburbs of the fast-growing polities, and it performs best where the CCU’s western tendency was strongest and where federal administration is most distant. It is weakest in the Columbia District, the Pacific cities and the industrial commonwealths, and it has no presence to speak of in the constituent monarchies.

Its vote is younger and more male than the CCU’s and contains an unusually large share of people voting for the first time. It is also, by every measure the pollsters use, more attached to its leader than any other party’s vote is to its own: a large majority of AfR’s voters say that they vote for the party because of Ambrister, and a large minority say they would not vote for it without him.

The electoral system has served the party well. Its vote is spread across the interior and the outer suburbs rather than concentrated, it wins few constituencies outright, and it wins most of its seats from the per-polity top-up under the best-loser rule, which awards a polity’s additional seats to the losing candidates who came closest. A party that comes second in many places, as AfR does, is rewarded by the rule, and the 62 seats AfR won in 2028 included more top-up seats than any other party’s.

Electoral record

AfR’s seats at the general elections it has contested, in a Commons of 460 seats in which a majority is 231:

Leaders

Identity

The party’s colours are violet and black, chosen in 2016 because neither had been used by any other federal party and because, in Ambrister’s account, violet was the colour of royalty before anybody owned it. Its emblem is a violet ring broken at the top-left, crossed by a rising arrow whose shaft completes the circle: the settlement, in the party’s own reading, broken by the alternative that passes through it. Its opponents read the arrow as leaving the ring, and the party lets them.

Its slogan since 2016 has been “Give it back”, which the party never completes and whose object its members supply for themselves: the constitution, the prerogative, the country. Its rallies end with the royal anthem, sung louder than anywhere else in the Realm, and its critics say that this is the only thing AfR has ever taken from the CCU that it did not have to fight for.

The party at present

AfR holds 62 seats and is the Official Opposition, which it became without winning anything and without anybody voting to make it so. In the deadlock that followed the general election of 7 September 2028, the other five parties signed the Heads of Agreement that put Caleb Whitlock, Lord Whitlock in office, and AfR was not a party to it and was not invited. The largest party not in the ministry is the Official Opposition, so the cordon that every other party maintains against AfR has ended by making it the alternative government. Its leadership says this daily and is not wrong.

Before that it held 35 seats and sat outside Ana Valdez’s coalition of the LSDP, the Liberal Federal Democrats and the Greens, and the Official Opposition was the CCU. It has, for the first time, the Opposition’s rooms, its allowances, its place at the despatch box, and the right to the first question at the Prime Minister’s monthly appearance at the bar of the House, which Ambrister has used to ask Lord Whitlock, each time, whom he answers to.

AfR has not formed a shadow cabinet. Every other Official Opposition in the Realm’s modern history has named a front bench to shadow the ministry’s departments; Ambrister has named none, and he answers for the Opposition on everything himself, from the Foreign Office to Agriculture. His explanation is that the ministry’s business is limited by its agreement to Loreto, supply and very little else, and that an Opposition does not need twenty spokesmen to oppose a government that may do three things. His critics, who include several of his own members, say that a party which wants to be trusted with office should show that it has people who could hold one, and that AfR has refused to find out whether it does. The CCU, which held the Opposition for sixteen years and now sits on the ministry’s benches, says that it has never seen the despatch box so busy or so lonely.

Its opportunity is the Rights Act case now before the Royal American Supreme Court, which seeks to extend the enforceable duties to income security. AfR is the only party campaigning for the case to fail and for legislation to reverse the doctrine whatever the judgment. A ruling for the applicants would give it the clearest grievance in its history and would put the CCU, which opposes the extension but will not reverse the doctrine, in the position of agreeing with AfR’s objection and refusing its remedy. Ambrister has been careful, since October, to say that the party will accept whatever the Court decides and will ask Parliament to change it, which the Declaration members regard as the October line applied in advance.

Ambrister’s conduct as Leader of the Opposition has been, by the Commons’ standards, unexpectedly good. He attends every sitting, asks the first question at every appearance of the Prime Minister at the bar, and asks it briefly; he has made no speech in the chamber longer than ten minutes; and he has twice, in two months, told the House that he agreed with a minister, which no AfR member had said in ten years. The Commons’ long-serving members, who had expected the Opposition benches to be used for broadcasting, have found them used for opposing, and some of them have said so, privately and with some surprise. The Declaration members say that their leader has been tamed by the despatch box. The leadership says that he has been given one, and is using it.

On Loreto the party will vote against the Bill settling the territory’s form, if it comes before the enumeration and a referendum of the Realm have happened, and has said so. After the earthquake of 2 November its members said what everybody else’s said, and when Lord Whitlock accepted Russia’s offer of rescuers without consulting his Cabinet, AfR, which might have been expected to object to a premier from no party acting alone, did not.

The party has made no preparation for office and its critics observe that it has never had to. Its founder has led it without challenge for twelve years, its parliamentary group is new, and it has produced no programme for government beyond the constitutional demand. Whether it is a party that intends to govern or a party whose purpose is the demand itself is a question it had not been obliged to answer until October 2028, when its leader answered it, on the steps of the Supreme Court, in a direction a part of his party did not expect and has not forgiven.

On 9 November 2028 the party split on the question it was founded on. Ambrister rose in person to oppose Joseph Many Horses’s ten-minute rule bill for a convention to write a new Charter keeping the Crown, calling it the political class writing itself a new constitution, and forced the first division he had forced in the new Parliament. His deputy, Wade Carrick, a fellow defector of 2016 from the Republic of Florida, voted for leave with at least eight other AfR members and was named among the bill’s sponsors, saying that the double majority and an unelected House’s veto over the Charter were the party’s causes, and a convention the first room anyone had offered to argue them in. Leave was given by 214 votes to 71. Ambrister left the House without speaking to his deputy, and the party issued no statement that night. See The Convention Bill.

Trivia

See also

• Conservative and Crown Union, the party AfR split from and takes its votes from
• The King’s Question, the ABC’s record of 25 October 2028, the day of the Loreto seats judgment and Ambrister’s October
• Royal American Supreme Court, which decided Ambrister v Attorney-General for America
• Barry Goldwater, whose western tendency both parties claim to inherit
• American Rights Act, whose judicial reading AfR alone proposes to reverse
• Governor-General, whose reserve powers AfR has repeatedly demanded be used
• Territory of Loreto, whose seats AfR challenged and whose settlement it would put to the whole Realm
• Elections and Constituencies, the mixed-member system with no threshold that seats small parties
• The May Day Bombings, whose security settlement AfR would repeal

Alternative for the Realm · Political Parties · Institutions & Government · United Kingdom of America