To be or not to be, alas poor Liz we knew her not at all (Should the monarchy be abolished?)

Member Name: mpeh

Product:	Should the monarchy be abolished?
Date:	13/07/02 (1185 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: .

Disadvantages: .

What does the monarchy ever do for me? Well not much in a personal sort of way, funny that. I'm not really on speaking terms with any of them, I was very briefly with Prince William when he played for the university hockey club but that was only for about four weeks last September. Despite my flippant opening the basic question is presented differently by different people: 'Are the monarchy worth the money we pay them?', 'Are the monarchy a good thing for this country politically?', etcetera, etcetera.

We pay the monarchy a large amount of money each year simply to keep them going. The civil list is something in the region of £250 million a year divided amongst the Queen and her immediate family. On top of this, much of the land in this country is owned by the monarchy and they take large amounts of revenue from it every year as it makes profit, or in rent. They are a costly resource. One argument for retaining the monarchy is that they are good for the tourist industry and I think that this is undoubtably true. Mainly American tourists and holiday makers are attracted to our sunny shores (hehe) in hope of seeing the queen, Buckingham palace, the changing of the guard and other such 'royal paraphernalia'. Do they bring in enough to justify the amount of taxpayers' money spent on them every year? In a simple blow for blow comparison I don't know. The figures are not obtainable, it's impossible to calculate how much the monarchy is worth in tourism and the amount of money that goes to the monarchy is also hard to trace accurately. If we look at it from the other way we can ask how much revenue would be lost if the monarchy was abolished? Assuming we retain the palaces and the traditions such as the changing of the guard then the answer is probably not very much. As I read in another opinion on this subject (sorry if this is plagiarism) one of the most visited sites for tourists on the continent is the palace of Versail
les. A palace with no kings or queens and which has had none for hundreds of years. This seems to point to the fact that people want to visit the palaces and see the sites even if they are no longer used as monarchic dwellings. On the other hand Versailles has historical importance as a place of international treaty making but to be fair the collection of monarchy owned buildings in this country would fast attract tourists as the National Trusts prized possessions. I would hazard a guess that the monarchy are not as valuable as the money we pay out for them in a purely financial sense.

Politically there are a lot of different ways of looking at the monarchy. This country needs a head of state, all countries have them and they are a necessary thing in the current international political community. I'm not sure this is strictly true but I'm willing to accept that a head of state for Britain is a necessary thing. At the very least it is currently a necessary political position as the political change necessary to allow a system with no head of state requires a revolution both physically and in the populations ideology. The Queen is an effective head of state, non-elected and therefore politically neutral she can be looked upon as representing the people of this country. Whilst I agree that it is useful for the head of state to have no political allegiance as this means they can maintain relations with other countries with no political agenda other than friendship between two states, the flip side of this coin is that the Queen does not really represent this country's populous. Merely by being who she is and living the lifestyle that she leads she is conservative, this isn't necessarily a criticism but it is unfair to represent the people of the United Kingdom as conservative, we aren't all that way inclined. She is rich without working and so rich that it ceases to mean too much, very few people in the country are that well off and even few
er of them inherited their wealth. The Queen, and most of the rest of the royals, are out of touch with the people, she doesn't really know what it is like to be a citizen of the United Kingdom. She speaks a different language to the rest of us and certainly doesn't represent Welsh, Scottish or Northern Irish people. I'm English (much good it does me) and even I can see that there is an Anglo centric bent on the monarchy.

Britain is supposedly a democracy (the discussion of a first past the post constituency based whip system is for another category) and the monarchy is anything but democratic. We finally abolished hereditary peerage and surely the monarchy should follow. What makes someone a suitable candidate for being head of state? Birth, the biological fluke of having those parents (I know it should really be the other way around). When we elect our Prime Minister and all our political representatives in the House of Commons we still have an non-elected head of state with the power to appoint people to the House of Lords. With a three house system, which realistically is two houses, the Queen's power had degraded enough that she can no longer really throw a bill out, we the electorate vote in the members of the first house and the Queen, one person, chooses those people who make up the house of lords. I know that in reality there are a large number of people who advise the Queen and pick people to be made Lords but in principle we allow one person nearly the same power as the electorate. Merely looking at the people who make up the house of lords tells us something about the way our country is run: They are all what I would call rich, maybe there are a few who aren't but I'm unaware of them. Half the people in the business of running this country are considerably better off than myself- now I'm a student and so immediately seem to have no money but talking of family background I'm somewhere a little above average (unles
s I'm to believe the crazy average income of a British family household is above £40,000 per annum and I don't, I think that includes so many really really rich people that it mauls the average). My parents both work which helps. Basically the point I'm trying to make here is that the House of Lords are also distinctly non-representative. Whether or not the House of Commons is is yet another question which I probably shouldn't address here. I don't feel that the system of election we use in this country allows the electorate to be accurately or fairly represented at national government level.

I have nothing personal against the queen or the rest of the monarchy. They have positions of privilege but I do not envy them, they have more than enough duties to severely restrict their lifestyle, not to mention always being in the media's lenses and gossip columns. I would not swap my comfortable little life with the relatively few money worries I currently have and the distinct probability of worse ones when I leave university for a life with no money worries and a load of others instead. I know there are members of the royal family who get their money from the civil list, inherit property and other than attending various royal functions never really have to worry about other things. It is expected that they do certain things, attend Sand Hurst and serve in the military for a time but certainly now William has demonstrated having a mind of his own (shock horror, granny must have hated that) those pressures have been drastically reduced for future generations. This is a country whose government recognise the need to join the tentative European state before it's too late and yet are not doing so because they promised their voters a referendum (which came down to 'Do you want to lose the pound?') which elicited a very negative response: A government actually following the majority of the electorate's wishes (assuming that the
majority of the electorate actually voted). If we had a referendum on the monarchy I am in no doubt that the overwhelming vote would be to keep them; almost everyone over the age of sixty (who bothered voting) would vote to keep them and a lot of people younger than that would too. Many of the people who wanted rid of them would not bother voting because they would be sure that there was no chance of their vote actually making a difference.

I've been very negative so far suggesting that the only good thing the monarchy achieves is being a tourist magnet. This is undoubtedly, for the country in general, a good thing. The royals do do other things. State visits, asides from costing the taxpayer millions every year, are good for Britain's image abroad. We can maintain good relations with countries whom politically we have very little dealing with simply by posting over a royal for a month or two every few years, as long as it's not Prince Phillip. I'm sure that the queen and many of her immediate family work very hard all the time, as much as anyone with a more usual full time job in fact, but are they actually doing anything that we couldn't do without or that wouldn't be done automatically by some civil servant or other if they weren't there? Also what does the queen actually do? Well she opens parliament, does processions and visits and receptions for ambassadors from other countries. What else? I don't really know, I'm pretty confident in suggesting that most of you don't either and this is indicative of the problem that the queen has with her image. The people on the street, as we are, don't actually know what functions the queen performs. Unfortunately in this country due to political paranoia and the worry that a politically educated and aware electorate may change the status quo we don't have a general public knowledge of what our MPs do or how the civil service operates. It's very much a insiders clu
b. (As an aside I think I saw a statistic somewhere that if you removed all the MPs who went to public school and then all those who went to Oxford or Cambridge you'd have about six left, worse still there isn't anyone above a certain level in the civil service who didn't go to Oxford or Cambridge, the veracity of these statistics I cannot be held accountable for but if all I'm doing is spreading a malicious rumour that helps to upset the old boys' applecart I cannot make myself feel any remorse.) This lack of knowledge of what the queen is for cannot help her image at home, and yet I still find myself thinking a referendum would return her to power very easily. What this says about my confidence in the electorate doesn't bear repeating here.

If the monarchy were suddenly to be magicked away to a small retirement island somewhere, unreturnable and uncontactable, would the British way of life collapse? I think, and fervently hope, not. If our government and/or civil service was similarly removed then the system would grind to a halt, the more levels removed from the top down the more damage done. Whether removing the same number of levels from the bottom up would do still more damage is a thought provoking question. If you asked Mr. Blair I'm sure you'd get a different answer than if you write to your local councillor, well that won't in fact evoke a response but you get the point. Just because we can do without something is not a reason to remove it, but is it a reason to stop putting millions of pounds of public money towards it every year?

If that money were saved, if we stopped paying such a huge civil list where would the money go? Does it matter for the question at hand? Firstly where the money would go is another question I don't know the answer to. As a guess based upon living in this country and seeing where money is generally put it wouldn't renationalise the NHS or the railways, it wouldn't
rescue the royal mail from it's self dug pit or revitalise the police, I'm fairly sure local government wouldn't benefit much and as such schools and education in general would, as usual, miss out. Defence would gain, recruitment for the services is in desperate need, if we need an army that much. Does the money that currently goes to the civil list amount to much when held against the national budget? I don't know, in fact almost certainly not. It probably doesn't cover the funds given to a decent sized county council every year but it does add up to a load if you consider what that amount of money can achieve, once a year. It more than pays the wages of all our politicians in the house of commons, is the monarchy really worth more than the house of commons to us?

Secondly does where the money would go affect the argument as to whether we should have a monarchy or not? Well firstly not directly, it is more to do with whether we should keep paying the civil list. If we assume that the amount the monarchy costs us is accepted as a reason to abolish them then the destination of the regained money could be important. If I said 'Is killing someone wrong?' would you say 'Depends upon what the victim was going to do with their life if the killing doesn't take place'? Probably not. The rightness or wrongness of the monarchy, if such a thing can be quantified, cannot be affected by the decisions about what to do with the money freed by their abolishment.

The monarchy is an outdated institution that highlights the sorry state of the political attitudes and systems in Britain. It's time we truly modernised and represented ourselves proportionally and effectively, starting from the top down.

Summary: