By Eamon Murphy
Filed under: Government Spending, World Leaders, People
Here’s a paradox about Great Britain. In many ways, it’s a more progressive country than the United States, its colonial offspring. It has a more generous welfare state (including national health care), a more progressive tax structure, and a third major political party to the left of Labour. Most workers are entitled to at least 28 paid days of vacation per year, and same-sex marriage will soon be legal throughout England and Wales.
And yet Great Britain maintains one of the most conservative institutions on the planet: a hereditary monarchy, something Americans would never countenance. This despite the fact that King Charles I lost two civil wars, leading to his own decapitation and the short-lived abolition of the monarchy, in the mid-17th century.
And though the royal family’s political significance has long since been reduced to the ceremonial, the Windsors still have a massive financial footprint. As sovereign, the Queen owns the Crown Estate, a property portfolio worth £8.1 billion ($12.4 billion) as of last month — the first time its value has exceeded £8 billion. It includes a lot of prime real estate — “large parts of London’s West End,” “15 retail parks in various towns and cities,” shopping centers, offices, agricultural lands, forests, and “most UK coastline,” according to the BBC — and 15 percent of its annual revenues is used to fund the monarchy. The rest goes to the Treasury.
As a result of the these assets’ recent performance, the Queen is getting a raise: the Sovereign Grant, as her cut of the Crown Estate’s revenues is called, is set to increase next year from £36.1 million to £37.89 million (more than $55 million) — a gain of 5 percent, and the second consecutive bump to her allowance.
“The Crown Estate as a whole dates from the time of the Norman Conquest,” explains the monarchy’s official website — more than 900 years ago — but the current arrangement came into effect in 1760. That was the year King George III — the intolerable tyrant of the Declaration of Independence — signed the revenues over to the Treasury, and in return, stopped having to pay for the civil government, the national debt, and his own personal debt. Those expenses were covered by something called the Civil List, funded by the Treasury and supplemented more recently by grants from other departments, until the Sovereign Grant Act of 2011. Buckingham Palace called the change “a modern, transparent and simpler way of funding the head of state,” but opponents of the monarchy are unconvinced. “Pegging royal funding to Crown Estate revenue makes no sense at all,” said the group Republic, which advocates replacing the Queen (or King) with an elected head of state. “The two are not related. Crown Estate revenue has always been there to provide funds for the government.”
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Source: FULL ARTICLE at DailyFinance
