The King is not above the law - Oliver Cromwell proved that. If a Royal, even the King, broke the law in any major way, they would have to answer for it. At the scene of his car accident in 2019, the late Duke of Edinburgh was duly breathalysed by police, as required by law, and found to be clear, as was the driver of the other vehicle. What followed on, given that no breach of law had taken place, was a private matter.
What is also fundamental in a democracy is the right to vote. A right denied to almost all members of the Royal Family and hereditary peers from birth. Members or potential members of the House if Lords cannot vote by law. Therefore any hereditary peer -whether or not they take their seat - and their offspring who might inherit the title, cannot vote. This remains the case even after the number of hereditary peers was reduced. The only vote peers are permitted is to elect 75 of the 91 hereditary peers who still retain seats in the Lords. Since almost any senior member of the Royal Family will also be a peer, they don't get to vote. The King (or Queen) is not a peer and cannot take a seat in the Lords, but by convention, does not vote because the role requires political neutrality.
The King actually has fewer civil rights than we do! Less freedom of movement, less freedom of association, less freedom of speech and no freedom of religion. These rights are surrendered in the name of duty -a duty that consists solely in signing papers, reading speeches, one weekly meeting, saying yes when some career politician ask him to dissolve Parliament, and asking some other career politician to form a government. Oh, and saying 'agreed' a lot in Privy Council meetings, even if he doesn't agree.
Being Monarch is a shit job. So is herding sheep. We breed dogs expressly for the latter, and we also breed people expressly for the former. Because nobody in their right mind would do it out of choice.
What you and I are doing, here and now, expressing political opinions in a public forum, is something the King can never do, even in private.
Inequality is baked into all systems. In point of fact, there was never any intention to allow equality into them in the first place! Equality was deemed unnatural, against the laws of both God and Nature.
That said, British society, even with our unelected Head of State, is far more egalitarian than the USA, with its rigid and apparently unbreakable hierarchies of plutocracy, gerontocracy and race.
Except in this one case, that our Head of State has, was born with, fewer personal and political rights and freedoms than the average 18-year-old! Worse, our democracy depends upon this being the case.
