Now worth at least £6.2 billion, the Crown Estate owns huge swathes of land, from Regent Street and other large chunks of the West End through to every bit of the seabed up to 12 miles offshore – now worth a fortune as wind and wave power rights are being sold off – as well as rights to the natural resources on the continental shelf and 265,000 acres of prime farmland.
If it were turned over to the Treasury for the use of the common good it could make a real dent in the proposed spending cuts that will massively affect us all.
Instead the Tories are giving the Royal parasites a pay rise.
The jewel in the crown by Dan Carrier, Morning Star Thursday 23 December 2010
This week I met four homeless people who have been camping in a tent placed carefully above a hot-air vent outside a church in Gospel Oak, north London.
They scavenge for grub in bins outside supermarkets and crap in plastic bags.
Even in the summer it would be horrible but in this bitter winter it looked unbearable.
I found it even more galling as I flicked open a newspaper afterwards – while thanking my lucky stars as I nursed a cup of tea in my warm, comfortable flat – to read an excellent article on the future of how we taxpayers will fund the royal family in the coming year.
Forget the nuptials between William Windsor and Kate Middleton.
A far more interesting story has developed this year regarding those scrounging champions of injustice and oppression who we call the royal family.
The average person in Britain is facing major cuts to their standard of living and a comprehensive breakdown of the public services designed to make our country a nice place to live.
Meanwhile the royals are raising their champagne flutes as the Tory government has struck a deal which will make them even richer at the expense of the public purse.
Rewind to the October public spending review when Chancellor George Osborne unveiled his plans to slash council budgets for elderly luncheon clubs, to close children's centres, to put pupils back into leaking classrooms, to make higher education the preserve of the rich, to condemn those who are ill to wait in agony for treatment, to grab back vital pennies from those who need them most, to freeze the meagre pay packets of the humble people who say cash is not always what a rewarding life is about, to scrap investment in green energy, to scrap state help for those who need legal representation but are too poor to pay for it, and to lay the blame for the sickening excesses of the financial bubble at the door of those who are least able to afford it… remember?
When Bullingdonian Osborne was telling us all about how we all had to feel the squeeze, he also sneaked through some legislation that has not received much attention, although two unlikely bedfellows – the Morning Star and the Financial Times – have both commented on its inherent injustice.
Osborne revealed he was changing the structure of the civil list, the way we pay for the privilege to be royal family's subjects.
Instead of giving them a hefty annual wage, they are going to be allowed to take a fat slice from the profits of the Crown Estate, the lands their ancestors stole throughout the centuries.
The civil list came about in 1760 when George III handed over income from the Crown Estate to parliament in return for a hefty annual wage.
This Crown Estate essentially comprised property his ancestors had pinched from everyone else in Britain.
George III was both mad and dangerous, a poor king in terms of his duties. He mucked up his reign regally in attempting to keep the loyal capitalists in America on his side, letting his stodgy beliefs lead to a showdown that neither side wanted before spinning the country into debt with his continuous warmongering, leading to the deaths of thousands through violence and poverty.
The Whigs and Tories came up with the idea that for managing the Crown Estate they would hand over an annual salary to the King, something George – who was skint after trying to bash the French and Americans – agreed to.
Osborne has said he doesn't want this system in place any more, but before we start throwing our caps in the air and thinking poor Charles Windsor will have to live off his own oat biscuits, the Tories haven't struck a blow for a new age of the enlightenment in which we become a country of genuine equality and meritocracy.
Of course they haven't.
Instead the paltry £40m Her Majesty gets from our taxes will be no more, and the Queen and assorted hangers-on will instead get a handsome cut of the profits from the Crown Estate lands, now worth at least £6.2 billion.
The Crown Estate owns huge swathes of land, from Regent Street and other large chunks of the West End through to every bit of the seabed up to 12 miles offshore – now worth a fortune as wind and wave power rights are being sold off – as well as rights to the natural resources on the continental shelf and 265,000 acres of prime farmland.
If it were turned over to the Treasury for the use of the common good it could make a real dent in the proposed spending cuts that will massively affect us all.
There is more – the estate has recently undergone an aggressive asset-management campaign, namely selling off things that they don't think will make them fortunes.
This includes 550 homes in Camden Town that are let out at affordable rents to key workers, pensioners and people on disability benefits.
The Crown Estate has decided the Queen would do better if instead of owning these homes, they sold them off and invested the cash elsewhere.
What is the betting that the elsewhere includes corporations in the oil industry that poisons our planet or the arms trade that murders the innocent?
They are doing this right across London too, all to help pay for Will and Kate's nuptials. No, hang on -we're getting stung for that.
Whitehall number crunchers say the settlement will mean a larger piece of the pie for Lizzie, Philip, Charles, Camilla, Andrew, Edward, Sophie Wessex, Wills, Harry, Alexandra, the Duke of Gloucester, the Duke of Kent, Darth Vader and others.
The Queen alone has a personal fortune of £300m and then assorted privately owned properties such as Balmoral and Sandringham.
Then there is her Duchy of Lancaster which owns the Savoy estate in central London – as well as vast acreages in Cheshire, Derbyshire, Lancashire, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire, Staffordshire, Yorkshire and Wales. Charles' Duchy of Cornwall sorts him right out with a fat annual income too.
It is absurd. Posh snouts in the trough all round, and what for? To perpetuate a world of inequality, of a sense of us and them, and of inherited privilege.
As the royal wedding approaches we need to raise awareness of how silly and unfair this all really is.
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