The Monarchy In Britain
A brief guide The Crown Estate |  |
The Windsor family have done fantastically well out of the British people. There should be no surprise that as their popularity declines they are looking for ways to ensure that whatever happens their good fortune does not turn to hard times. They have promised to go quietly when the people tell them to. But they have not promised to go without one more grab at our money. The Crown Estate seems set to become an important and audacious element in their bid to protect the only way of life they have known. The Crown Estate consists of property holdings worth about £4,033M. They are concentrated in London where there are over 600 properties, valued at £2,626M including embassies and West End stores. Outside the capital the portfolio includes Ascot horse race course, a castle and more humdrum commercial properties, including fish farms. The Estates include 274,000 acres of farm land and forest. The profit from these properties in the 2001 - 2002 financial year was £163.3M, up from £147M the previous year, based on a rental income of £220.5M. These holdings originated when King William the Conqueror expropriated vast amounts of property in the eleventh century. Of course he did not take this property simply as a private brigand. He was the ruler of the nation and acted as such. In other words the property was taken in the name of the state. It has belong to the state ever since. The rents earned from the property financed the administration of the country, not the personal needs of one family. What has changed is that the monarchy is no longer identical to the state. It was 700 years after William conquered that the incumbent king, George III, gave up this revenue to parliament, in return for a stipend, known as the civil list. He wanted a more reliable income than the rents guaranteed. Even at this time the monarchy still had much real power and was much more than a ceremonial appendage of the state. This transfer of income was, therefore, between one part of the state and another. The Windsors have been sneakily contesting this for some time, however. The Crown Estate web site describes the estate as “part of the hereditary possessions of the Sovereign.” One of the first proposals of the Way Ahead Group (a committee responsible for reforming the monarchy to improve it’s chances of survival) was that after a break of 250 years the family again be paid the Crown Estate rents, in return for giving up the much smaller civil list payments. In The Royals Kitty Kelley comments on the admiration of a government minister for this wheeze that it showed, “the respect of a pickpocket for a bank robber.” The idea was raised again more recently. In June 2001 Liz’s chief financial officer (Keeper of the Privy Purse) Michael Peat claimed that because the state receives the Estate profits the monarchy costs taxpayers nothing. The taxpayers were making a profit from the deal, the form KMPG director claimed. “In fact the queen doesn’t cost the taxpayer anything” he said. In the New York Times Dr Joanne Horton, an accounting expert at the London School of Economics called this claim “propaganda” and “a public relations stunt.” She was not the first to see things that way. In an internal Treasury memo in 1952 a senior civil servant, Burke Trent, wrote that “ … the hereditary revenues which it is now customary for the Crown to surrender at the outset of each reign are simply a historical relic from much earlier days.” The writer who uncovered this memo, Phillip Hall, calls the arrangement “historical fiction.” He notes that the Estate only belonged to the monarch when the monarch was responsible for all civil government expenses, which ended at the end of the 18th century. In short the Crown Estate is no more the property of the Windsors than are the Crown Courts. Liz Windsor has no more right to it than Tony Blair has to 10 Downing Street. If the Windsors did manage to make the Estate their personal property the taxpayers would lose a source of annually increasing income in return for being freed from the declining burden of the Civil List - in current terms we would give them £148M a year and they would forgo £35M. And when monarchy is finally sent packing, it would go with the biggest golden handshake in history. We must not allow that to happen. It may be called the Crown Estate but it belongs to the people.  Back to the Constitution Centre
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