{"id":6482,"date":"2024-07-27T20:44:11","date_gmt":"2024-07-27T20:44:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/?p=6482"},"modified":"2024-07-27T20:44:13","modified_gmt":"2024-07-27T20:44:13","slug":"the-crown-estate-why-attacking-it-isnt-an-attack-on-the-monarchy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/?p=6482","title":{"rendered":"The Crown Estate: Why Attacking It Isn’t An Attack On The Monarchy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Just recently (and possibly triggered by the \u00a345 million pound share of the Crown Estate<\/a> 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).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Well, I say first-born child of the monarch, but in reality parliament decides<\/a> who gets the crown even if it is the first-born by default. It has been that way since parliament demoted<\/a> the first Charlie with an ax.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ever since that time, control over the Crown Estate has effectively been under parliament’s control. That control became explicit<\/a> when George III explicitly passed control over the Crown Estate to parliament in return for no longer being responsible for the expenses of government.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That last bit is significant – the third Charlie has two<\/em> 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u00a345 million), but some<\/em> is perfectly reasonable. If we were to pick a random person to be the monarch (perhaps not a bad idea), paying them something<\/em> out of the Crown Estate would be only sensible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Blue Flower<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Just recently (and possibly triggered by the \u00a345 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 […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3],"tags":[2268,2267,2264,2266,2263,2262,2265,1988,30],"class_list":["post-6482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-ax","tag-charles-i","tag-charles-iii","tag-charlie-i","tag-charlie-iii","tag-crown-estate","tag-king","tag-monarchy","tag-uk","category-3-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/mstdn.social\/@grumpygrimnir\/112860400987163204","error":""},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1f2KI-1Gy","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6482"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6482\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6490,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6482\/revisions\/6490"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/really.zonky.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}