Just recently (and possibly triggered by the £45 million pound share of the Crown Estate income that the monarchy is getting), there has been a lot of republican jumping up and down about how the king owns the sea (i.e. off-shore wind farms pay rent to the Crown Estate).
I get it. Although I’m not an active republican, I do think selecting the head of state by being the first-born into the right family is a bloody daft way of picking one. I just think there are more important matters to sort out first. Just remember, if we elect a head of state we could wind up with a lettuce.
Well, I say first-born child of the monarch, but in reality parliament decides who gets the crown even if it is the first-born by default. It has been that way since parliament demoted the first Charlie with an ax.
Ever since that time, control over the Crown Estate has effectively been under parliament’s control. That control became explicit when George III explicitly passed control over the Crown Estate to parliament in return for no longer being responsible for the expenses of government.
That last bit is significant – the third Charlie has two fortunes – his private fortune and the Crown Estate. Why two? Because the Crown Estate is supposed to serve a special purpose – it is supposed to be used to pay for government.
And it does. The overwhelming majority of the Crown Estate income goes into the Treasury; Charlie gets 15% supposedly to pay his expenses as head of state. Now this may well be too much (especially as it has risen to £45 million), but some is perfectly reasonable. If we were to pick a random person to be the monarch (perhaps not a bad idea), paying them something out of the Crown Estate would be only sensible.
An attack on the Crown Estate is not an attack on the monarchy; if we abolish the monarchy, the crown estate will still exist. It might go through a name change and it might not be quite so generous to the head of state, but it exists independently of the monarchy.
