Windsor Castle: Changing hundreds of royal clocks
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Can we also talk about how the vaulted ceiling has a similar, but altered motif as the floor? Really talented stuff!
The pendulum mechanism is on each bell. It is activated by the bell ring, and left swinging to indicate which bell or bells rang.
> When he's not changing the time, Fjodor's job includes spending one full day a week winding up the mechanical clocks to keep their pendulums swinging.
> The rest of his week is spent in his workshop servicing and repairing clocks, many of which are 200 to 300 years old. When a part breaks or wears out, Fjodor makes a replacement using a lathe, a milling machine and lots of hand tools.
That sounds like an absolutely awesome job to me.
(And then once per day they wait for the midnight signal to catch up any clock that's that far off)
“What is time? It’s what a clock measures.”
What is a clock?
You could speed up this process massively by simply reducing the number of clocks to a sensible number.
By way of illustration, consider two scenarios:
A: The government sends the Royal Family 100 million pounds directly, every year.
B: The government via property law enforces the Royal Family's ownership over a property portfolio, allowing them to collect 100 million pounds a year in rent.
Which of these "costs the taxpaper" and which doesn't? Many people will insist that A does, and B doesn't.
But in fact, both A and B do "cost the taxpaper" much the same.
The government does not 'send' the family anything, it takes £200m from the profits of their assets and leaves them with £100m.
If the government ignores property rights and seizes assets arbitrarily, the whole economy would collapse.
There is no cost to the taxpayer anywhere.
> The government does not 'send' the family anything, it takes £200m from the profits of their assets and leaves them with £100m.
You are obviously unfamiliar with how it actually works. The revenues of the Crown Estate belong to the Treasury (aka, the government). On a regular basis, the Treasury makes a payment to the monarch personally equal to 25% of these revenues, because a law says they must.
The government literally sends money directly, exactly as I said, and this represents a direct cost to the taxpayer, as I said. If they did not send this money, the taxpayer would be better off.
Would said revenues remain the same, were the monarch to be taken out of the equation?
Of course, the public would benefit immensely by no longer having to send a quarter of the revenue to the Queen personally.
From the way you were speaking it seemed like you were just calling the private assets of the monarch their estate.
If you mean the income provided here, then it is for the execution of the sovereign's duties, ie., all the staff; diplomatic costs, building costs, etc.
You may be able to argue it would be less if we had another head of state, but i'd imagine the whitehouse spends a similar amount. (Likely, much more so, given the cost of presidental travel).
It's explained in excruciating detail here in the Sovereign Grant Framework Agreement[0], it is a grant of £85.9 million from Treasury. However, this amount is proportional to the value of Government revenue received from Crown Estates.
This is in keeping with the agreement between King George III and Parliament to give up revenue from the then unprofitable Crown Lands (now more precisely termed The Crown Estate[1]) in return for a Government stipend. The Crown Estate (which is still "owned by" The Crown[2]) now makes £345 million a year[3].
In contrast, The Duchy of Lancaster and The Duchy of Cornwall and the Royal Collection are not funded by Government, and are instead funded by the Royal Family, or admissions/donations, for the later.
[0] https://www.royal.uk/sites/default/files/media/sovereign_gra... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_Estate [2] https://www.thecrownestate.co.uk/en-gb/resources/faqs/ [3] https://www.royal.uk/sites/default/files/media/sovereign_gra...
Of course it costs the taxpayer. The government could simply stop handing over millions of pounds a year to these people if it wanted to. But it doesn't. This decision costs the taxpayer.
Taking the logic further - all privately owned property and revenue "costs the taxpayer", relative to the public owning it instead.
What people are concerned about is whether it is taxed income which funds this, and it isnt.
The law is quite clear on this.
edit: I really don't care if this gets downvoted or not. The monarchy is a horrible institution to glorify and daylight saving time is just as awful. Neither of these have any relevancy in a modern age.
In the UK the Royal approval rating is something like 80%. In the US the Presidential approval rating is by design something like 50% because they’re party-political.
Our head of state represents us more satisfactorily than theirs. Doesn’t that make it a better system in practice?
If you want to have a purely ceremonial head of state, it could still be an elected elder statesman rather than an aristo "by god's grace" and "divine" right. I.e. the German/Austrian/Italian presidential model where the president exercises about as much real power as queen Liz (i.e. a once-a-year state of the union speech).
Or you go entirely without - since Liz refuses to use her corrective powers even in such blatant cases of procedural abuse like the proroguing of parliament, then the post is useless and the Prime Minister might as well be Head of State officially.
For example elected elder statesman such as Higgins: approval rating around 70%.
Prime Minister: approval rating around 34%.
The Queen has an approval rating around 80%, sometimes as high as 90%.
Charles, on the other hand... I suspect that the monarchy is always only two mediocre monarchs from abolition.
> Neither of these have any relevancy in a modern age.
The affect of light in the modern age is diminished?
I guess what I'm amazed at is that he thinks that the Queen of England getting her food on time is what qualifies as important.