D is for Democracy Unmasked

Week D | Tuesday | Heavy is the Head

People in the UK are rightly discussing many state institutions, norms, and processes which no longer seem to operate as they should. This can be complicated by not being sure how it is that they’re supposed to work. The monarchy serves as a prime example.

The gradual entrenchment of democratic structures and ideals over time, without deposing the monarchy, has led to an odd situation, almost a form of magical thinking. The monarch is still nominally head of state, the sovereign, retaining many historic powers and duties, but most are only symbolic, so as not to interfere with ministerial rule or parliamentary sovereignty.

Queen Elizabeth’s sovereign powers are limited in practice to such functions as appointing and meeting weekly with the prime minister of the day, bestowing honours, and being the ceremonial head of the armed forces. She nominally retains the royal prerogative, the position of primary executive power, as reflected by the final stage of any new legislation being the Royal Assent; however, this hasn’t been withheld since 1707. The sovereign has the power to dismiss a prime minister, but last did so in 1834.

The Crown is a Schrodinger’s Hat: defended as being the last bulwark against a tyrannical government, while simultaneously unable to wield any power to stop a tyrant lest it itself be accused of tyranny.

This symbolic edifice is supported financially by UK taxpayers via the Sovereign Grant, the cost of which increased dramatically in 2019 and again in 2021, when it was £87.5 million. A major cause of the increase is the funding of renovation work on utility systems, asbestos removal, and disabled lifts installation at Buckingham Palace.

In May 2021, a YouGov poll found support for the monarchy had fallen to 61%, with 24% against. It identified a particular rise in republican opinions and calls for the monarchy’s replacement by an elected head of state among 18 to 24-year-olds.

Given this trend, and the amount paid to support the institution, it seems likely that the democracy-minded might have two, somewhat conflicting, views about ‘the Royals’. Be a bulwark against the actual tyranny and uselessness of the current government; if you don’t, what are you actually for? And in all other ways, as a relic of a long-ago undemocratic stretch of history, remain politically neutral while representing us appropriately.

Very evidently, the monarchy has done nothing, publicly at least, to stem the growing tide of fascism, disorder, death, desperation, and division brought about by the Tories over the last 12 years but especially the last three-and-a-half. Not even when the Crime Minister illegally prorogued Parliament, or when he breached international law. Charles happily read his Mum’s speech out in Parliament this year, dressed in gold on a gold chair in front of a gold wall while Unicef fed some of the many hungry children of Britain. It was proper Dickensian.

I’ll mercifully draw a veil over It’s a Royal Knockout, the Diana Years, Fergie, the divorces, the tampon longings, the suckings of toes, the racism, Charles pal Jimmy Savile, SWEATY NONCE ANDREW: the family stuff. So I’ll focus on the staying-out-of-democratic-business and financial elements: not The Family but The Firm.

In 2020, Emeritus Professor Jenny Hocking of Monash University in Australia won a lengthy court battle to access decades-old correspondence between the Queen and her representative in Australia, Governor-General Sir John Kerr. The 1975 dismissal of then-prime minister Gough Whitlam and his government by Kerr was the only time in the country’s history that an elected government was brought down by the unelected rep. It remains controversial whether his role actually lent him the legal powers to bring it about. Nonetheless, Prince Charles wrote to Kerr to congratulate him, calling his dismissal of a democratically-established body “courageous”.

In 2015, 27 secret memos between Prince Charles and government ministers in 2004 and 2005 were released after a 10-year legal battle by the Guardian newspaper. It cost the government aka the taxpayers close to half a million pounds to lose that fight.

The documents showed intense lobbying of PM Tony Blair by the heir to the throne, among other things demanding improved equipment for troops fighting in Iraq, requesting improved availability of alternative herbal medicines in the UK, urging a badger cull, and proposing that his own aide brief Downing Street on new hospital design. The cache is known as the ‘spider letters’ because of his eerie handwriting.

This was not the end of princely lobbying. From 2010 to 2015, Charles had 87 meetings with ministers, opposition party leaders, and government officials. Given how difficult it was to access the spider letters, it is impossible to know the true extent and influence of Charles’ insertions into government decision-making. This is, you will recall, the man who would be King.

Last month it was revealed that Charles compelled government ministers in John Major’s 1990s government to secretly change a proposed law, to benefit his landed estate. Senior ministers yielded to such demands to avoid a constitutional crisis.

Both Charles and his mum have repeatedly (and I mean over a thousand times) used a procedure called Queen’s Consent to change laws to benefit their private interests. They are given a peek at draft legislation in advance to see whether their public powers or private assets might be affected.

It goes further than just looking. Ministers must get royal consent before the relevant legislation is approved by parliament; not the same thing as the rubber-stamping third and final stage of legislation creation known as Royal Assent. The Queen’s spokespeople said Queen’s Consent is just as inconsequential as Royal Assent. But then 1993 documents came to light showing that Charles prevented tenants on his estate from being included in right to buy laws, one of four times we know of that leasehold laws were changed in favour of royal landowners at the expense of their tenants. Cough *feudalism* cough.

We know the Queen and the Prime Minister meet weekly. What they discuss remains a secret (except on the two occasions blabbermouth Boris revealed some snippets). So we in fact have no way of knowing whether Her Madge minds her business on those frequent occasions, or is as interfering as her firstborn. This is a problem in itself.

Many people think the Crown has paid taxes since widespread outcry in 1992 over Windsor Castle fire repairs. In fact, it’s still exempt from taxation by law, including a prohibition on application of income tax to Sovereign Grant takings, and forgiveness from payment of inheritance tax (which alone must surely represent a loss to the country’s coffers of multiple billions).

What happened in 1992 was that it acceded to payment of ‘voluntary’ income and capital gains tax on private investments and on the Privy Purse (income from the Queen’s private estate the Duchy of Lancaster’s assets, land, and property), but only ‘to the extent that the income is not used for official purposes’. It’s like an onshore offshore tax haven, based purely on status and what a Greek boyfriend once described to me as “an accident of sperm”.

The 2017 leak of the Paradise Papers on global tax avoidance showed that the Duchy of Lancaster employed offshore private equity funds to avoid paying more tax, in common with megacorps like Facebook, Nike, and Apple. Schrodinger’s Fat Cat: simultaneously making bank via being both an archaic anachronism and a very modern corporation.

There have been multiple scandals in the last few years involving the Queen’s children and grandchildren taking money from people in the Middle East and elsewhere. Charles and his charity are embroiled in a cash-for-honours scandal, and he was reported to have taken actual holdalls full of cash. On another occasion he got £1 million in Fortnum and Mason carrier bags. Andrew’s daughters received many thousands from some dodgy character without raising an expensive-plucked eyebrow; I guess it’s just Normal For Royals.

And of course, Andrew had to step down as a ‘trade envoy’ after 10 years of getting up to who-knows-what in our name. That decade cost taxpayers $28 million in fancy travel and security expenses. In 2021 it emerged that Tory David Rowland paid off a $2.8 million loan Andrew took from Banque Havilland, controlled by Rowland’s family. Andrew borrowed $236,000 every three months from 2015-17. In late 2017 he asked for $472,000 for ‘general working capital and living expenses’. The debt was repaid in December 2017 by a company registered in Guernsey and controlled by the Rowlands. Nice work if you can get it.

There's so much more but I’m tired now and I imagine you are, too.

Only when it comes to light do they give it back or promise not to do it again. As with the government, they weren’t sorry when you didn’t know: never forget that.

The Queen is now head of state in only 15 ‘Commonwealth’ i.e. former ‘pink bits’ countries, from which her family drew wealth over many years. Barbados became a republic this year, and Jamaica looks likely to follow suit. 

In the UK we got rid of the hereditary privilege bestowed on one family 373 years ago but have ended up with one anyway, the descendants of descendants of German and Greek princes, invaders, robbers, and warlords somehow considered by many to be ‘uniquely British’. Schrodinger's Aristoprats. Perhaps they are, come to think of it. But that’s not a good enough reason to keep them.

It’s at this point in the argument that people start asserting how great the royals are for tourism. France makes way more from tourism than the UK, and their royals are … well. Anyway. Versailles remains much-visited.

Once the Queen goes, Charles will be desperate to boost ever-sinking ratings because no one has the same fondness for him they may have had for his mum and grandma, and the stability and momentum of her long reign will be lost.

Perhaps the monarchy could agree to do a reality show for their public face, in exchange for us letting them continue to make private loot and dodge the taxes that could have rid the nation’s children of their gnawing hunger and chilled bones. At least that way we’d get to see some of the castles and paintings and so on that we’ve worked so hard to help pay for. We could call it Dynasty.

EDIT: 11.9.22 — well, that happened. And here it all still is. And news of yet more alleged tax dodging, by our new King, with whom I once had a little spat.