Peak wealth extraction
Remind us why they deserve all this?
Queen Elizabeth II may have been styled the “people’s monarch”, but for much of her reign, and especially its last 40 years, the amassing of vast wealth was simply de rigueur for the UK’s financial and landed elites.
As the Guardian investigation into the cost of the royal family reveals, the late queen was at the forefront of her class’s pursuit of wealth extraction. Using royal privilege, the crown secretively exempted itself from public scrutiny and taxation. Royal fortunes soared. And this was the rule, not the exception.
She wasn’t “styled ‘the people’s monarch'” by me thank you very much.
The consequent optics for the incoming head of state are [bad]. His family’s vast accumulation of wealth is all the more glaring when juxtaposed with soaring levels of poverty and hardship among his subjects, including as many as 3 million children. But the one is part of the cause of the other. While the king may not have uttered “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche”, the parallel with the “great princess” who apparently did is not fanciful. Monarchy helps make vast disparities of wealth seem normal and natural, an enchanting part of our jolly heritage to be questioned only by mean-spirited and unpatriotic scoundrels.
Plus also their vast wealth is itself one of those vast disparities, to put it mildly.
This is where an incoming Labour government might make a stand. It could embrace rather than resist the change symbolised by the crowning of a new king. And it could do so in ways that in turn symbolise a new conception of public life: built on transparency, not the hiding of wealth in tax havens; on integrity, instead of the easy acceptance of gifts and payoffs; and on economic justice, rather than the hoarding of wealth by a few.
You’d have to start over with a completely different crew though.
While I suspect most of the vastly wealthy have done little to deserve their wealth, building economic empires on the backs of poorly paid employees who do the hard work, at least some of those empires have given a little something in return. The royals aren’t really even rulers anymore; that is done by Parliament. They are like the naked woman carved on the prow of the ship – no purpose but decoration. Not that they are particularly decorative, but in general, one would wish they did something to promote the public welfare. A friend of mine from London used to defend the queen; she insisted that the queen was more than a figurehead, that her activities brought a lot of money into the country. That may be so, but it sounds like most of it went into her own bank account.
Seize their wealth, let them keep the palace and a modest stipend then tell them to piss off.
Even while agreeing with the post in general, and even with the editorial improvement, I cannot help but gawk at this horrible sentence. “The consequent optics for […] are [bad]” should be something like “This is a bad look for […].”
Nor by me.