On the one hand, most of the physical tourist attractions could be maintained without monarchy actually owning or inhabiting them - indeed, the tourism value of Buckingham Palace would perhaps be improved if you could actually go inside.
On the other hand, perhaps that would ruin the mystique - and the mystique is certainly worth something too, as the wedding of William and Kate is estimated to have generated several billion pounds in tourist revenue all by itself, which is enough to pay for several decades of monarchy.
Versailles is one of the most visited places in the world. Having no royal people in there makes zero difference to that.
We could have the tourism without the actual royals, 100% no problem there
[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/991925/visitors-palace-o...
[1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/373081/uk-royal-tourism-...
These are not the sorts of places that people typically visit on overseas holidays more than once. So once the ticket has been bought, whether or not it is "an actual royal palace" is irrelevant.
Of course people like to feel the glamour of being close to the mystique of living wealth, but once an attraction is firmly on the circuit it hardly matters. See Tower of London, Blenheim Palace, Edinburgh Castle, Hampton Court Palace, etc.
According to Association of Leading Visitor Attractions, Buckingham Palace would be around the 70th most visited attraction in the country, hardly a sign that you need a living monarchy to sustain tourism - https://www.alva.org.uk/details.cfm?p=423
1. Versailles has a boatload of art in it and is massive.
2. Some rather dramatic things happened there.
Buckingham palace has plenty of art, but so does the V&A Museum.
And you can't re-create the historical drama and preserve stability.
Also see, from https://www.royal.uk/royal-finances-0
> The Crown Estate as a whole dates back from the time of the Norman Conquest.
In 1760, George III reached an agreement with the Government over the Estate. The Crown Lands would be managed on behalf of the Government and the surplus revenue would go to the Treasury. In return, the King would receive a fixed annual payment, which was called the Civil List. With effect from 1 April 2012, the Civil List was incorporated into a new system of funding referred to as the Sovereign Grant.
The Crown Estate is not the personal property of the Monarch. It cannot be sold by the Monarch, nor do any profits from it go to the Sovereign.
The Crown Estate is managed by an independent organisation, headed by a Board, and any profit from the Estate is paid every year to the Treasury for the benefit of all UK taxpayers. The Treasury is effectively the principle Government stakeholder and is kept informed of the estate’s overall business plans and strategies.
The Estates portfolio has a value of over £7.3 billion, from beef farms in the north of Scotland to Portland stone mining in Dorset. Windsor Great Park is the only Royal Park managed by the Crown Estate. All other parks are administered by the Royal Parks Agency.
Correct.
> “nor do any profits from it go to the Sovereign.”
Incorrect. Currently 25% of the Crown Estate’s profits are paid to the Monarch. This was raised from 15% in 2018, and is set to revert back to 15% in 2028.
”The palace, like Windsor Castle, is owned by the reigning monarch in right of the Crown. Occupied royal palaces are not part of the Crown Estate, but nor are they the monarch's personal property, unlike Sandringham House and Balmoral Castle.”
Occupied palaces, like Buckingham Palace, are owned by the reigning monarch ‘in right of the Crown’ (like you pointed out).
Similarly, the Crown Estate belongs to the reigning monarch ‘in right of The Crown’.
“In right of The Crown” means it is owned by the monarch for the duration of their reign, by virtue of their accession to the throne.
So, you are correct (and I was wrong) that Buckingham is not part of the Crown Estate.
Notwithstanding this technicality, would you agree that the overarching point remains that it isn’t as if “the money goes to the monarch for their personal enjoyment” (which is what I interpreted you implied), but towards Buckingham renovations, which is a property of The Crown[1] (i.e the state) and which in turn is embodied by the reigning monarch.
It sounds to me as if the monarch is like a custodian/shepherd of these assets for the benefit of the state (the crown).
Being able to make laws helps with that.
Only because of Hollywood accounting.
Tourists don't come to England to see the Queen. Tourists can't see the Queen. Tourists come to see the Palace. The Queen doesn't own Buckingham Palace. The government does. If the Queen were to disappear tomorrow, tourists would still come to England to see Buckingham Palace.
Sure, but that's the metric you need to go by if you want to evaluate the tourism value of a "living" monarchy.
That tourists would continue to exist with or without the queen doesn't really tell us anything useful. It's a question of how many.
You could merge them, South Africa-style if you wanted, but it's pretty unusual. Most parliamentary systems separate the two.
You don't want one person having both.
Its the main reason royals serve in the armed forces.
Why does the armed forces need to pledge allegiance to a person?
> In the UK, it's the monarch, not the government. That balance of power (military v political/legislative) gives you national stability.
I don't think there's much evidence of that.
> You don't want one person having both
Why not?
> Its the main reason royals serve in the armed forces.
The main reason the royals serve in the armed forces is that the royalty (and even the broader nobility) is a remnant of what is notionally a warrior elite that is traditionally barred from servile labor but has position of authority ultimately grounded in military function. The substance of both the authority and the distinct warrior class is almost entirely extinct, but traditions remain, including the tradition that it's pretty much the only thing that looks like work that senior royals are permitted to do, as anything else in government would be seen to violate their distance from that function and anything else would be seen as demeaning the monarchy.
Mind you - he was an officer and from a rather posh guards regiment so that's kind of what I would expect him to say.
Mind you - the UK can only have a standing army with the express permission of Parliament:
This requirement only seems to apply to British Army, the Navy and Air Force are exempt. W good example of how unimportant the pageantry is.
In contrast, the 'Royal' Navy was created expressly by the monarch so allegiance is implied.
Under the Westminster system of government, I cannot see any alternative to having a seperate head of state that is not part of the government, even if they do nothing more than wake up every 5 years, appoint a prime minister and go back to sleep again.
In a parliamentary system, the legislative body selects a head of government using a negative process, i.e. they choose the first best alternative that won't lose a vote of no confidence. You don't need 51% approval from parliament, you need to not get 51% disproval.
And depending on country, there are rules for in which order the various players are asked and how much time is allowed to pass for horse-trading and coalition-making, but generally the order is that you first ask the incumbent if they want to continue governing, and thereafter each party leader in order of size in parliament if they have an alternative that they think can pass a vote.
Also, in countries where coalitions are the norm, the various parties have aligned into blocks during the election campaign so that you can be reasonably certain that a vote for party A implicitly is a vote for their block.
We, here in the rest of the world, use a magic number to determine that. 51% (or 50% + 1).
Various factions horse trade until some coalition of parties has a majority, and then they rule as coalition. Members of both the Conservatives and Liberal-Democrats had cabinet seats.
The main downside to this sort of process is that sometimes negotiations take a long time. Belgium spent nearly two years bickering over forming their coalition in 2010.
Form a coalition that does or have new elections. You can even set a timeline after an election for a coalition to be in place or new elections are mandated by law.
EDIT: which seems to have been introduced in 1993 and never removed :-/
Usually “smallest integer greater than 50%”, of which the other two are imperfect approximations.
Why do you need to have someone make a choice? Have a set timeline for one of the other to secure the support of a Parliamentary majority or new elections are called by operation of law.
It is however seldomly proven. Should that not be a requirement, like it is for the rest of us?
I think it's an interesting social experiment that may be worth the cost it requires to maintain.
Elsewhere, there are alternative viewpoints. The funny thing is that your proposed institution assumes the layman is the one who needs to be taught or reminded more often than not.
Ok, but how is that related to the political power of the monarchy?
I don't think tourists even know what powers the Queen actually holds.
The concept of personal property can perfectly accommodate of a limit in how much a individual person can personally own, especially in regard to the distribution of wealth in the whole population.
An Act of Parliament could just ascertain that the Windsors exempting each other from Inheritance tax was unlawful, and ask the new Republican Revenue & Tax office to assess 40% IHT on every historical generational transfer of assets.
Just redressing the historical injustices that the Windsors benefitted from would strangely make them much less rich.
Monarchy isn't a hot potato, that the current power-holder has to directly pass on lest it get "dropped on the floor" and cease to exist. Monarch is a belief of the people that a position of power exists and is "open" to be taken by a person with a claim on "right to rule." It's a thing you can convince people you deserve, at which point they put the crown on your head rather than shooting at you for wearing it. Succession gives a peaceful path for that transfer of power, but succession isn't the default; a power vacuum being grabbed at by random nobles—usually violently!—is.
If the current monarch stepped down, someone else without the same scruples would just step up. You'd have to, in effect, get every even-barely-theoretically-"righteous" noble to all agree to denounce the power, for the power to truly go away.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Rival_successions
Like there can be some guy living in another country who says "um, that monarchy no longer even exists" or "um, my ancestors lost that war a long time ago and I don't plan to reignite it", but still has some kind of association of enthusiasts who claim to actively want him on the throne. One such example is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz,_Duke_of_Bavaria who insists that he doesn't actually think of himself as the King of England -- his relative who last actually exercised that position was deposed back in 1688 -- but that doesn't stop other people from thinking of him that way. :-)
Wikipedia has several dozen people listed in the official present-day line of succession to the British throne and notes that a genealogist has claimed to identify over 1,000 people in that line.
It's possible to imagine a France-like republican future for Britain in which people's elaborately detailed and extensively researched pretense claims are not very interesting news for the overwhelming majority of the population, but it probably wouldn't be something that would happen overnight in response to a couple of abdications when a huge number of British people and a substantial number of people with claims to the throne are actively enthusiastic about the monarchy.
In theory, it'd then be shared as belonging to the nation. In practice, you'd get the political class lining their pockets in the short term, and leaving us worse off in the long term.
Between letting successive populist governments have free reign over what happens to certain wealth, institutions and freeholdings and spunking it on policies during their 4 or 8 years in charge, and letting a somewhat stable (if sometimes self-serving) hereditary monarchy retain stewardship over the course of centuries - I'm inclined toward the latter.
Emphatic no from me on that one.