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.
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