Once again, we see an example of the British royal family living high off the hog at taxpayer expense.
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are under attack for extravagance on Tuesday after the annual publication of the royal accounts showed they have already spent £2.4m ($3m) of public money renovating their new home, Frogmore Cottage—and work on the property is still not complete.
…Courtiers have moved to defend the spending, saying that a significant portion of the money would have needed to be spent anyway to preserve what is, they argue, an important part of the country’s built heritage.
However, critics dismissed this argument, saying the house, which was previously divided up into five individual staff flats, was only converted at such huge expense into a single home because Harry and Meghan turned their noses up at the prospect of living in Kate and William’s shadow at Kensington Palace.
So a palace was not good enough for them? Or maybe it was too cramped because of the in-laws being there? Who gives a damn?
I have been baffled by the public’s fascination with, and acceptance of, a bunch of parasites who feel entitled to live grand lives at taxpayer expense purely because of accidents of birth. The main skill of the royal family has been its ability to convince not only large segments of the British public but also, inexplicably, significant numbers of Americans too that the minutiae of their lives are not only interesting but worth funding on a grand scale. They particularly seem to go nuts over their weddings and births.
I have had arguments with liberal friends of mine in the US who defend subsiding their lives as serving a useful function, though when asked to, they are hard pressed to find justifications other than that the family provides some continuity and stability in the political system.
I don’t get it. But I am a reasonable person and willing to compromise. If the Queen does serve a useful purpose as suggested by her supporters, I suggest that the British government provide just the Queen with an allowance that would enable her to live in reasonable comfort in an apartment somewhere so that she can perform her ceremonial duties such as give the throne speech and open post offices and whatever the hell else she is expected to do. But the rest of her family have to go out and get jobs and support themselves. And that would have included her layabout racist husband Philip when he was younger. As Hamdi Dabashi writes, “His xenophobic bigotry is pure, his sense of class entitlement undiluted, unencumbered, uncensored, liberated from any inkling of bourgeois inhibitions. He does not mean to be offensive. He just is. He is a walking embodiment of every layered lava of European racism summed up inside one royal head.”
Maybe the other members of the family are not as overtly racist as Philip. But they are undoubtedly imbued with the same sense of class entitlement as can be seen from the way they spend the public’s money to live lavish lives.
They all need to get jobs.
I don’t think it can be literally transposed without any modification at all, but this struck me as a good start for someone who wished to create a good description of Joe Biden without having to turn an original phrase. Perhaps something like:
That requires no skill at all. A lot of people are absurdly fascinated with lives of the rich and famous. See the Kardashians, e.g.
As for waste of public money, I’d put the royals fairly low on the scale. There are rich arseholes who spend more than $3m of their ill-gotten gains on their brats’ sixteenth birthdays. The argument that it is their money to do with as they please doesn’t hold much water. Most wealth is theft.
To be clear: I’ve never been a royalist. But I just don’t see them as anywhere near the most pressing concerns. What is US military spending at now? How much money is lost by corporations simply not paying taxes they owe (and I don’t mean via legal loopholes)?
^^^
In the UK you can be either a Royalist or a Republican. Or not care. I’m really not that much fussed either way. But if you get so up in arms about the cost of the civil list (tax monies paid to the Royal Family) then…
1. H&M’s income comes from the Duchy of Cornwall which is basically rents from private ownership (via the Prince of Wales) of land.
2. The civil list was abolished and even when it still existed it wouldn’t have paid for *them*, only the core Royal Family. Now they get the same income from the Crown Estate (again, private land rents, via the sovereign themselves) which remits directly to the Exchequer but funds what used to be covered by the civil list (so unlike previously the civil list which was a fixed statutory payment) cannot accrue internal surpluses or deficits from year to year.)
3. The Sovereign also derives a private income from the Duchy of Lancaster, same as above.
4. So if you don’t like that, your target should probably be a root-to-branch overhaul of major land ownerships within the UK, because they’re not doing anything any large private landowner doesn’t do.
5. …but in any case if you care about the cost to “the taxpayer”, then FUCK WHINING ABOUT THE ROYALS, GO FOR THE REALLY RAPACIOUS CORPORATE EXTRACTIONISTS, BOTH DOMESTIC AND FOREIGN, WHO PRIVATISE VAST AMOUNTS OF PUBLIC WEALTH AND PAY NO TAX, ALONG WITH THEIR POLITICAL SPONSERS.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2W7P3wGBI8
It’s funny, but also true.
Well, VolcanoMan beat me to the Philosophy tube video. It is very well worth a watch!
Oh, but but but… we do pay tax you know. Not because we legally have to you understand, but completely out of the generosity of our hearts. Why we were doing that since last century, 1993 or some such, and we shall continue to do it forever more, until and unless we change our minds. Hurrah for us!
The fact that other problems exist in the world does not justify that we should ignore THIS problem until every single other problem is solved.
Sure, when it comes to counting how much tax money is wasted on something, the British royals might not be as expensive as tax loopholes for the billionaires or the military budget, but nonetheless, I strongly believe that royal families must be eliminated all over the world. Hereditary titles are immensely wrong, they are anti-democratic. They are strongly visible and they look disgusting. There’s an argument that the British royal family represents their country. I despise all the kings and queens. If I had to seriously accept the idea that royals represent and symbolize their countries, I’d be forced to despise said countries due to the association. By the way, personally I think that the British royal family is simply a highly visible and disgusting stain upon an otherwise mostly nice country, I don’t believe that a disgusting family of entitled brats can possibly represent some country.
Aren’t members of the royal family among those found to have stashed money in one of those tax havens? The one Bono (from the band U2) also uses? This news was broken a year or two ago. So you get money for doing next-to-nothing, and then you hide it away. Not just parasites, but sneaky ones as well.
I’m anti-monarchy, but I also see a lot of the complaints and hand-writing from the press about this renovation as not actually about the money, but about Markle because she has the temerity to be 1) a commoner, 2) an American commoner, and most importantly for all the crap she gets, 3) not entirely white. There has been a lot of racism directed her way, which is almost funny because the white side of her family has been extremely trashy.
I really must object to this article. The sum in question is no more than the price that reasonably wealthy business people pay for a home.
As for being jobless wastrels, being a working member of the royal family is a job in itself. The Queen keeps in daily touch with the affairs of State, her Prime Ministers of all parties have looked to her as someone to confide in. The members of the royal family are patrons of very many organizations and charities. Imagine landing in a helicopter with a posh car waiting to whisk you away with a police motorcycle escort to be the guest of honour at some place -- now imagine having to do that three times a day!
Prince Harry founded the Invictus Games. Prince William worked as an Air Ambulance pilot. Both have worked towards improving attitudes to mental health.
Do not forget that the royal family are real people. They were either born into their position or married into it. Prince Philip was the son of a Greek/Danish prince and became a refugee. His father deserted the family and his mother became a nun. Just because he sometimes only opens his mouth to change feet does not make him a racist.
Just look at this clip to see what a ‘royal’ really does: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-48774280
If you cannot get the BBC where you are, here is a transcript:
Prince William has said he would “fully support” his children if they were gay, but admitted he would “worry” about the added pressures they would face.
It was something he had thought about since becoming a parent, he said.
“I wish we lived in a world where it’s really normal and cool, but particularly for my family, and the position that we are in, that’s the bit I am nervous about,” he said.
The duke was speaking to young people at a LGBT youth charity in London.
The Albert Kennedy Trust (AKT) supports LGBT young people who are at risk of homelessness.
The duke said he backed “whatever decisions” his children made, but added: “It does worry me from a parent point of view.
“How many barriers you know, hateful words, persecution, all that and discrimination that might come, that’s the bit that really troubles me.
“But that’s for all of us to try and help correct and make sure we can put that to the past and not come back to that sort of stuff.”
Walton?
Is that you?
It is true that the majority of the royal family’s wealth comes from them being major aristocratic landowners, with hereditary holdings going back centuries. That does not negate the disgrace of the state spending money on them too -- in fact it makes it worse, because they could easily afford their lavish lifestyle entirely out of their own funds. Indeed, if they were forced to fend entirely for themselves they would not need to get a job as we understand it, because they could live very comfortably off the rents they collect from their estates. The jobs that the younger royals tend to do are largely for show, as a part of the carefully crafted propaganda machine to stop people realising what a waste of space the whole bloody lot of them actually are.
To be honest, I think the morally appropriate thing to do would be to seize and redistribute their wealth, when we do the same with the country’s other hoarders, parasites and money addicts. The class system is Britain’s original sin, and we’re still living with it. Too many of my fellow Britons are uncritical of that nasty piece of their cultural inheritance.
We don’t really want an elected head of state though, and looking at what yours gets up to hasn’t warmed us to the suggeston. But the queen’s role as figurehead could basically be performed by a corpse anyway -- you could get the government itself to do its policy speech, and send charismatic diplomats to meet foreign leaders -- so my suggestion is that we keep the monarchy, but start recycling kings and queens rather than making new ones. 2066 is coming up in a few decades, so why not stop there, and have the next millennium of royals as a re-run of the last? William the Conqueror could be king again from 2066 to 2087, then William Rufus from 2087 to 2100, and so on until 3066 when we start again. Then all the people who whine that it’s about honouring history and bringing in tourism can be fully satisfied. We don’t have to dig the bastards up and plonk their corpses down on the throne in a robe and crown for the duration of their reign… but really it would be wasting a perfectly good opportunity if we didn’t.