Thursday 27 June 2013

A right Royal pay-rise

If there’s something that brings out the bonkers in large swathes of the British public, it’s not the four days of feeble sunshine we like to call summer, but Her Majesty the Queen and her expanding clan. The institution’s popularity is like a particularly stubborn dose of syphilis; a recurring fever that’s highly infectious, with a creeping madness that doesn’t shift in the face of the antibiotic of reason. Express any faintly treasonous sentiment or criticism, and you can expect a nation of beef eaters to come and drag you off to the tower.

Why on earth should anyone have any objection to handing over around £35 million of government money to a single family who already have a net worth of £359 million? What possible problem could someone have with Her Royal Highness being handed a pay-rise of 5%, while around 500,000 of her subjects are suffering the indignity of needing the services of food banks? After all, the most convincing reason to keep any constitutional arrangement must be the boost to tourism that it provides. The Presidency of the United States only survives because of the impressive sales of commemorative bumper stickers and gun holsters it engenders. The Irish Presidency costs a meagre 112 times less than our head of state, and clearly no-one flocks to Ireland to see His Excellency, opting instead to visit irrelevant gewgaws like Dublin, or enjoy the Republic’s fatuous natural beauty.

So let’s not forget the enormous magnets to foreign metal that the Royals provide to attractions like Buckingham Palace, even if it isn’t itself in the top 10 most visited historic sites in the UK, and the number one historic attraction – the Tower of London - only has historic associations with the Royals. Still, without the fabulously slim chance of catching a glimpse of the Queen in one of her regal pastel uniforms, clearly no tourist would ever dream of booking a train, plane or boat to visit our shores. And let’s also not forget, half of those shores and the seabed out to 12 miles is owned by the Crown Estates.

Besides being the lynchpin to the UK’s tourism industry, the Queen is also an essential rallying point for our armed forces, unlike the United States who have the largest and best equipped armed forces in the world. Meddle with the Windsors and watch our borders dissolve!

And what about all the good work this family does? Imagine those vast, unpopulated wastelands, filled with newly built shopping centres and other publicly funded projects made impassable by reams of uncut red ribbon. No sycophantic grins and snapping shutters there to justify the expense of chartered jets and Royal trains, for the sake of pulling back the curtains shielding commemorative plaques.

If you forget the cost of round the clock security, Royal travel and official visits - as the official figures do - then the Monarchy costs us a mere 53p each. This is 'good value for money', since none of us could hope to rattle around in over 21 palatial residences without being significantly inconvenienced by all those spare bedrooms. Thankfully, our notoriously frugal monarch has just enough company to stave off loneliness by keeping a slim household staff of 250.

The government is clear; the State needs to save money. It is therefore the apogee of sensibility to retract the Welfare State, freeze public pay-rises while inflation soars, and hand over more money to a single woman who already earns 1,362 times the average national wage. You may be struggling to buy bread, but at least you can fill your belly with the warming knowledge that an iniquitous tradition of inequality is being maintained for the good of the nation.