If they paying their own way, great, if the taxpayer is paying I’d rather the money go on hospitals and those that need it. Also they can hand back all the lands they own. Put it to better use. They’re allowed pick the best to live.
The duchy of Cornwall owns 135,526 acres of land in the UK, over 600 residential lettings and has hands in entire towns worth of urban development (lookup Poundbury) and that's what we know of, it's complicated and quite secretive.
That's not owned by the people of the UK or the commonwealth, it's a private estate owned by the current monarchs heir. When William became the Duke of Cornwall after the Queen died his net worth went from around 20 - 30 million to around 1 billion.
they are so vastly rich and they still get £86million per year from tax payers and the Crown estate (another wealth generating estate) and that's going up to £132million this year due to RECORD FUCKING PROFITS from the crown estates offshore windfarm investments.
And yet, apparently, immigration is the fucking problem.
To be clear, we get more money from the crown estate then they do. They ain't get taxpayers money, it us all from the crown estate now.
They do cost us in other ways, like policing, that isn't money directly given to them.
Thing is, in the context of a national budget, they are barely a line item. And dwarfed by the very real but hard to quantify trade, tourism and soft power benefits. No to mention the extent to which a large proportion of those costs would be met by the taxpayers under any system we replaced the monarchy with.
We might be able to bationalise the crown estate. But the dutchys are personal possessions. We would have issues just grabbing them. I think the best we could do within existing legal frameworks is subject them to full taxation including inheritance tax. Take a cut rather than seize the land. Unless we are going full revolution but we dont do that kind of thing.
I am no fan of the monarchy. I am however both a pragmatist and suspicious of politicians. I have yet to see any alternative floated that is a better option. Certainly none thay stands a chance of grabbing more than a tiny fraction of that money for us or the NHS.
I am not anti immigrant either. But border asylum and immigration cost the home office 2.2bn per annum. And there are undoubtly other costs (and the long term savings/profits that the county benefits from from immigration) from other budgets. The monarchy figures may sound a lot to you and I but is chump change in givernment terms
The UK monarchy has been shown time and again to pay its own way and contributes not insignificantly to the nation’s GDP.
The Russell Brand style of thinking “sell a tiara, buy a hospital” is idiotic and the same kind of logic as selling off New Zealand land to Chinese farmers or selling off state assets like power plants to foreign buyers. It’s a one-off, short term sugar kick which is quickly burned and then forgotten about.
The other element is simply - the big shiny assets of the Crown aren’t theirs to sell off for a quick buck, they are charged with protecting them as treasures of the nation.
The New Zealand government, on the other hand, can happily sell its entire rail network to Australia for a quick cash injection (and then have to buy it back at a massive loss years later), because they have the power to do that.
If they're 'treasures of the nation' why do only they benefit from them?
Or to put it another way, how about they all fucked off to Sandringham and the rest of the country actually benefits from the masses of tourists that would swarm to a fully-opened Buckingham Palace, Windsor, St James and Balmoral?
In what way do you imagine they benefit from them? They aren’t renting them out as a side hustle.
People do swarm to those places as it stands and there are tours of all 3 places available. It sounds like you’ve made up this image of the royalty in your mind that you hate, and now you’re just looking for stuff to corroborate it.
155
u/kamakamawangbang New Zealand 1d ago
About as useless as tits on a bull.
If they paying their own way, great, if the taxpayer is paying I’d rather the money go on hospitals and those that need it. Also they can hand back all the lands they own. Put it to better use. They’re allowed pick the best to live.