The Crown Estate
dw.com
dw.com
I grew up in crown estate housing and it was well known to be the best social housing around. Much better than Peabody etc.
In fact when austerity came in and they had to sell it, there were massive campaigns to fight it being sold off.
I am a republican for the record.
I think on balance, it seems fairer to say that the Crown owns a lot of land, and doesn't have the resources to manage it all competently. Their view is from 10,000 feet and us normal people are like ants...
(Interestingly, the only part of the law that the Crown does seem to have to obey is that regarding the listing of buildings. They performed some non compliant modifications on the cottage and were forced to change them back! Then again, perhaps the Crown merely chooses to go along with listings...)
Lots of the media coverage around the Crown Estate seems to focus on the wealth of the Royal Family - if I were their PR team I'd be trying to push the (quasi-)SWF angle pretty hard.
Given SWFs generally act like other large scale institutional investors - I suppose democratic accountability has put political pressure on some SWFs to act on ESG concerns (changing investment strategies away from fossil fuels towards renewables, voting in favour of climate activist resolutions, etc) but apart from that, is there any reason to think that the Crown Estate is doing a bad job at maximising returns to the government?
(And to be clear, though I suspect you know this - I'm not using the S in SWF to refer to the head of state specifically, but to the government, as is the traditional meaning)
The bit they are talking about is the residual that hasn’t had a “freehold” tenancy granted to some other person.
You can’t hold land in England and Wales. The Crown owns it all. All you can hold is a heritable interest in land - an interest that returns to the Crown if you die Bono Vacantia.
I think some US States had a feature where you could pay a fixed amount to satisfy all future property taxes, but I don't believe it relieved the possibility of eminent domain, escheat, or police power.
If the UK ditched the monarchy, the government would continue to own this property, but keep the 25%.
Anybody can make these. Anybody can capitalize them. They can own the titles to anything. The trustees can be natural persons and other entities and other trusts, and governments. The trustees can be swapped out with no public record of it ever changing. The directors and administrators can change as well.
There is an infinite number of them in existence.
It isn't more or less complicated that the Queen of England is intrinsically tied to one. The article does a disservice by leading with that.
The primary confusion is just in the name of the entity "The Crown Estate" as both a concept and a registered entity, the concept of the Crown/Monarchy, and the personal private holdings of the Queen. But these can easily be abstracted away by simply re-labeling them in a chart and not acting like its that confusing.
Is it because as long as there are living directors, they can technically vote to change the rules? Who would these directors for the Crown Estate be? The Queen? Parliament? A person at the top of the management chain?
Is there an actual mechanism (other than tradition, good will, etc.) that prevents the entity managing/controlling the Crown Estate from voting to change the rules about how it's governed and who gets what proceeds?
It seems that the answer to this question is that an act of Parliament could (probably?) change the rules, therefore it's not a perpetuity, and the share to the monarch is a tradition that they just aren't inclined to change right now.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_against_perpetuities
from your own article
“Many jurisdictions have statutes that either cancel out the rule entirely or clarify it”
The places that only clarified it have created lengths of time exceeding anyone. In the US some states made a length of time longer than the age of the nation itself
UK areas having similarly long results or abolishing the notion
Sorry, but that's just plain wrong.
Common law is law, and Parliament, the courts and the government all recognise it as being "real law".
There's nothing special about statute law that makes it any more "real" than common law.
The only difference is that statute law can do anything, including modifying or abolishing provisions of common law, whereas common law can't expressly contradict statute because of parliamentary sovereignty.
(And even parliamentary sovereignty has its theoretical limits - in R (Jackson) v Attorney General the law lords opined in obiter dicta that PS wasn't necessarily absolute)[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(Jackson)_v_Attorney_General...
Everytime the legislature gets involved they curb stomp the courts view of reality, thats the only point
It would also be interesting to know HMQE2’s liquid assets. It is all too common to be castle-rich and cash-poor.
I think the fact that one inherited dozens of castles and mansions that one can make exclusive use of, including lending them to people as political favors, including that one one's net worth is instructive.
(Assume a spherical warhead, with market value of $4m.)
Where has all the wealth gone? It hasn't. The Times changed the rules for the Queen (and only the Queen) after a nice note from the palace. Now, things she has full use of but can't sell aren't included (eg the Royal Collection).
Being 'Queen' is a job. She's effectively the CEO of a company (which is why it's informally called 'the firm'). She also works hard and has worked hard as a key member of the firm all her life.
Being upset at the Queen for being rich, is like being upset at the board members of an international bank. It's not her personal money, that she can take with her if she stopped being the Monarch, in fact she has less of an option to do that.
The Monarchy does so much for this country via tourism and and international relations, that we'd be worse off without them. Calculations have proven that they MAKE money for the country despite the huge cost in keeping the institution running.
This is the crap the royal family's press department churns out, to be repeated by fawning journalists trailing their every move.
More tourists visit Paris than London. Unlike in London, they can go inside those palaces and see the art collections.
The presidential guards in Athens or Moscow still do a ridiculous dance when they change shift, and Britain could keep their equivalent in a republic if it's what tourists want to see.
Republics choose who represents them. If they want a conman with no respect for women, they can vote for Trump. They can change their minds and vote for someone else a few years later.
Britain has Prince Andrew anyway.
Liz doesn't represent us. Britain elected Boris and his crew of incompetents and liars to do that job. Liz is merely a symbol.
She is completely unaccountable. The British press is unwilling to criticize, and people who've discussed anything with her rarely discuss it with others.
Princes Philip, Charles, Andrew and Harry have all been embarrassing, and they also represent Britain.
When there's a national disaster and we need someone to put on TV to provide calming words, when we want to organize charitable efforts, or send someone on tours to represent our interests, it's great to have a figure who can be brought out as a single trusted, respectable voice for the nation.
This person, almost by nature, cannot be an elected official. The moment you drag a PM or President-- ANY PM or President-- into the role, you're going to have 40% of the population ignoring the message because of toxic political divisiveness. You've also got the factor that many of them are short-term players-- if you were a real-estate developer until 5 years ago, you don't necessarily develop the same people skills and self-presentation.
In a way, having it be some sort of hereditary position works, because it's such a delicate job that you want a clear pipeline of people who can be developed for the job, trained for life, and kept "on call" for their turn.
Now, you could argue there's a way to get this sort of service with better value for money, perhaps bringing in a similar role with some more republican-friendly title instead of an allusion to an old absolute monarchy, but I can see the value a figurehead monarch can provide.
Elizabeth II has done, by any possible measure, a spectacular job in the spokesperson role for the country. Even the most ardent republicans generally don't dislike her on a personal level, and you can send her anywhere and be sure she won't cause an international incident.
I would accept Charles Windsor as president in a Republic of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. But he should compete against everyone else for the position — and if there's racism or interference in the legal process, we can kick him out.
Anyone who wants to be that figurehead should be disqualified.
I could perhaps accept a completly random figurehead, but then I think of the majority of Brits and realise what an awful idea that would be.
Aslo traditions liberals: "Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but they generally support free markets, free trade, limited government, individual rights.."
are fine with it. Modern woke lefties and old school socialists maybe not.
And tourism would be unaffected, because all the old buildings etc would still be there just the same. Paris does fine for tourism in spite of a lack of royal family.
Versailles is the most successful tourist attraction in Europe, with 10 million visitors per year. I'm confident that if we had the ability to fully open the Royal Palaces and make the whole of the Royal Collection available for public view, tourism would go up, not down. Viewed this way, they're a hindrance to the country making money not a help.
"However, 25% of the profits are given back to the queen and the royal family as part of the Sovereign Grant, which is used to fund the royal family itself on an annual basis. For example, this year's figure of £85.9 million is 25% of The Crown Estate's profits in 2018/19. So that means the queen's own personal fortunes are directly connected to the performance of The Crown Estate."
Note this is separate from the income of the Duchy of Lancaster (for the monarch) and the Duchy of Cornwall (for the Prince of Wales), which is more like personal income.
Wikipedia has a good overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_Grant_Act_2011
You think the people employed in the Royal Household wouldn't hustle to get the Prince of Wales a sandwich if he asked for it right away?
At a certain point income and status are the commingled. I remember the quote from I think Tony Blair, that he never handles money, when a fee comes up for cash he would ask one of his bodyguards for bills.
There are lots of orphaned entities on this planet which collect capital and grow capital and pay out to different parties who are not shareholders, who are not directors, or to no one. This is not a complicated concept.
Well, it is to certain people, the ones who will squabble over a debate about it for 100 years while nothing meaningful changes.
In the sake of this article, just make a flow chart instead of dancing around the concept of ownership like its a mysterious controversy for 10 paragraphs.
"And a FANTASTIC collection of stamps To win friends, and influence his uncle"
If I could snap my fingers and remove the royal family at no cost I would but otherwise there are bigger problems we need to address first.
Doesn't that apply to every country on earth? Even under communism I imagine the offspring of the dear leaders do better than the average.
And there's no problem about the Crown Estate. Profits from it go to the government, apart from the small part which is spent to maintain the royal household (those amounts are not exorbitant by any measure and it is amusing that the royals are able to do with so little, take literally every "person from TV" and they spend more). Only way in which Crown Estate is different from government property is that if in any case monarchy is abolished in the future, it will be returned to the royal family - now private citizens - to become their "normal" private property.
Only bad part about UK (and European in general) culture in that sense is that it's incredibly hard to "make it" locally. Indeed, most rich people either inherited their wealth, or just brought it from abroad having made it there (usually in some dirty ways). But this is a logical consequence of welfare state: in Europe, we don't let anyone fall through the cracks, social assistance system is truly comprehensive and there is not so much disparity in incomes. If you don't have any losers, you don't have any winners either: there is no way to have the cake and eat it too.
The economy is not this zero-sum, fortunately.
If we have employment laws that make it difficult to fire people, we have job security, but we also don't have any startups (how do you hire people there if it can go bust and you can't easily fire them, and why would anyone go to work somewhere where job isn't secure while elsewhere it is?).
There are many ways in which it works, and bottom line is: you either have crowds of bums, piss and shit and needles in the street but also ways to get rich from nothing if you work hard, as in the US, or you have neither, as in Europe. It's about choices. Letting people win big means making many more people lose.
Cynical approach is to do business and invest money in the US, and live in Europe. Which is actually what i recommend and what i do myself. With full understanding that i am living in a dead end place which is about to become sort of a living museum already in my lifetime, a human zoo.
And also, back then there weren't really any startups.
And they had it only because rest of the world nearly killed one another with US being the only country that managed to sit the WWII out.
I'll take the royals, who have been raised to have sense of duty and know they need to project the impression of service, over president Blair/Boris any day.
As for the sense of duty and noblesse oblige, well, I think Prince Andrew explodes a lot of those refined notions. As far as I know, the royal family hasn't sanctioned him in any serious way.
I didn't mean to suggest the royal family are unimpeachable beacons of virtue but that their primary motivations are different to politicians in a way that benefits the country.
But they do. For example, the Queen used her power to get an exemption from transparency laws with regards to her own personal wealth: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/07/revealed-que..., and her son Charles did the same to ban his tenants from purchasing freeholds: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/09/prince-charl....
By political corruption I mean activities that are obviously detrimental at societal level. That sucks if you are Charles's Tennant and you want to by the freehold but I'm think more of funnelling contracts to your unqualified friends like the PPE scandals. Again I'm not suggesting the royals are perfect just that the alternative is worse.
If I told you that the janitors responsible for changing the light bulbs didn’t wait for the lights to burn out and replaced light bulbs with a few weeks worth of life left (when replacing other light bulbs) and took them home to use them you probably wouldn’t bat an eye. It isn’t even worth spending time thinking about it in developed countries.
However, imagine you are in a developing country and corruption is rampant. I think you would justifiably be less charitable toward the janitor even though you know it is the same act but the pie is smaller so every bit counts.
The royals being corrupt in the UK (I hope it becomes just England and Wales within my lifetime, preferably with NI and Scotland withdrawing) is ok but the royals being corrupt in Swaziland is a big problem.
On a more uplifting note, polls indicate that this support has been slowly declining in recent years, particularly amongst the younger age groups: https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2021/0...
I'm British and not part of that 60%, and am fervently hoping this support declines more rapidly when the current monarch dies in the next few years or so. I think a lot of the respect for the monarchy here is driven by a personal respect for the Queen. The rest being our deep-seated cultural problem of class deference.
My personal opinion is that in addition to abolishing the monarchy, the state should seize all of their private assets, and every member of the royal family should be exiled. This is probably an even less popular opinion, but I think it's the only proper way to rid Britain of this parasitic family.
> Are any of the 60% around that could explain their thoughts?
If you ask a monarchist, they'll usually lean on one of two arguments: the financial and the traditional.
The former is the flawed belief that the monarchy is a money-maker for the UK and that it would be financially imprudent to abolish them. Usually this argument is based on the Crown Estate providing income for the Treasury, and the implied assumption that if the monarchy were abolished then that income would be gone, even though the lands are still there and there's no reason why the new republican government couldn't just seize the Estate as part of this abolishment. There's also the tourism income conjecture, but plenty of ex-monarchies have a strong tourism sector, and presumably there'd be a Royal Family Museum for tourists to visit in the new republic.
The latter is driven by cultural inertia and tends to be what monarchists lean on when the financial argument has been demolished. The talking points usually revolve around who would be the next head of state then, how could Britain possibly function without the monarchy, and so on.
Perhaps some monarchists would disagree with this characterisation of their beliefs, but having argued with many of them, these are my observations.
once the precedent has been set, how about they seize your family's assets too?
So it would only be a precedent for any additional monarchical assets discovered after the initial transfer of ownership.
so why can't we have it?
Alternatives like the US presidential republic system (currently at 0 years of peaceful transitions of power) don't seem more attractive to most people here.
This is a myth we like to tell ourselves, like the destroyed colonial records.
360 years ago is 1661. Shouldn't you count from at least 1688 "Glorious Revolution", when the current monarchy of Dutch ancestry invaded?
Or, if you mean the UK, count from the Act of Union 1707, before which the UK did not exist as such?
Or, counting "peaceful", from the end of the suppression of the Stuart monarchy in 1746?
Or, counting "UK" again, the distinctly non-peaceful transition of power of part of the UK to Dublin in 1922? The consequent violence of which only ended in 1998?
(especially if you're going to try to count the US Jan 6 incident as "not peaceful transition of power"! You have to overlook a lot of UK electoral violence if that's your threshold)
The monarchy have largely managed to steer clear of this in the 20th century, although there was a near miss when Edward married a fascist spy and had to be forced out. Undoubtedly the influence of Prince Philip whose family were indeed exiled from Greece at gunpoint made a difference. The Queen has been very cautious.
That doesn't make peace and stability a good measure. North Korea has managed a few decades of that, are they much better governed than the USA (for all its faults)?
Look closely at your measure, the UK has fought 2 Iraq wars, an afghan one, one in the Falklands, another in Yeman, Lebanon, Kosovo, Bosnia, Libya and Sierra Leone all on my short lifetime. So the claim UK Gov provides peace doesn't look great does it? Not compared to say Germany or France (republics).
The truth is, there is no strong justification for any one given form of government or for the House of Windsor.
I think the French have gone through five republics in less than the last 500 years for example if you want to compare to them. Also been occupied.
And I’m not sure comparing to Germany is a great idea…
Fundamentally the reason we have a monarchy is because most people like it. It reigns with consent. That's in extremely sharp contrast to the leaders of almost all other countries. 50% of Americans will by design always detest their president.
Would getting rid of the monarchy actually really change anything other than being change for the sake of change? Not really, so what would be the point?
As a German, it's cringe-worthy to me that a German state-run media outlet runs such a piece. The Crown Enstate Entity isn't "mysterious" at all if you engage with a country's history. But I think this is the spirit of our relations going forward since the Brits decided to not go with the program.
Also: The gap in housing affordability isn't driven by a palace outside of London, or some sea-floor property. It is driven by city governments and their "Highwaymaning" via zoning and more.
Although the "I may be one some day" point is true, its also very unrealistic to the point of being near-impossible; and in the UK case we aren't talking about a small percentage of the population (as in, eg. the US) that has the dreamed of status that won't ever be attained, just a handful of individuals who have it. That's just the ultra-billionaires and celebrities and doesn't take into account the clear familial traditions of those who are elected to run the country and their senior staff (Kennedys, Bushes, Trumps etc.).
So its kind of comparing 10 people in the entire country (UK) who have a status that you know will never have vs several hundred (US) who have it; just the latter has a smaller-than-lottery (?) chance of the average Joe getting there compared to next-to-zero (revolution or massive constitutional change) of the former.
Having established that the former set are "different", we then unify and either venerate them or revolt against them according to personal preference.
When you then add in the regal mystique, charisma and authority granted to holders of office with actual power like, say, [fill in your bogeyman President here], having a separate unelected, symbolic but powerless national figurehead - who genuinely represents all of us - starts to look like a much more attractive - and democratic - proposition.
I always find it amusing that 7 of the top 10 democratic countries are constitutional monarchies:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index#By_country
More generally, it seems that countries with ceremonial heads of state seem to score better.
Also the UK has only been a democracy since 1928. A democracy without universal suffrage isn't one.
By the standards of its time, I'm sure the UK was already democratic back then. But not by today's.
There are plenty of examples throughout history of movements coming to power by adopting marches, uniforms, ralies, ceremonies, symbols etc and co-opting them to their cause and calling themselves 'true patriots'. But in Britain, that's almost exclusively the relm of the Royal Family, so it's effectively impossible for any political movement to offer any of that in any meaningful way, because it's not really possible to be 'more patriotic' than the actual royal family. So yeah, if you want to feel patriotic you wave a flag an watch the queen do something quite harmless, as opposed to march with a, potentially quite nasty, group of politicians.
In Great Britain, as opposed to Northern Ireland...
Could you tie that to the royal family?
I’m not saying their are no marches and uniforms at all, even nowadays - but that they’re just going to have a bloody great struggle to try and upstage the ceremony and popularity of a Royal event - particularly if one of their claims is patriotism.
In the terms of the UK, the monarchy is interwoven with the national identity; it is its link to its past in human form. Most British people don't despise everything that has been done in the name of their country, and hence see the pragmatism of the constitutional settlement the UK landed on as the acceptable adjustment required to maintain something resembling a democracy.