The Monarchy vs Republic Megathread - Mk I

This question does not concern the monarchy - would you confidently support and recognise the will of the majority if the majority of people backed a deeply fascist and inherently undemocratic political movement?

I'm just curious, I'm not going to reply to your answer.

Except that for this new republic to basically say 'your private property was safe under the monarchy, but now in this brave new world, we're setting an early precedent that we can seize it any way we like' doesn't really appeal to many.

But it isn't the Queen's private property. It's the property of the Crown, and if the Crown ceased to exist it would make more sense for those properties to come under public/state ownership since in this country the concepts of 'the Crown' and 'the state' are pretty much analogous.

It is in no way as clear cut as you assume it is. Some of it is quite private, and the most that can be said of the rest is that it's in a murky middle-ground, partly private, partly public, partly public-for-private-use, and so on. There's a reason there's been no single court ruling coming down on one side or the other - it's simply too big an effort for something that, right now, matters so little.

You could use Parliament to legislate that it is absolutely all theirs, but that remains no fairer than I simply getting Parliament to legislate that the BBC belongs to me because I pay my license to it. You'll be trampling over the rights of certain individuals (and not just the Queen, but all the tenants and leaseholders that occupy the land too), simply to make a point. And not a good point, either.

No, it's pretty clear cut. All properties in the Crown Estate are owned by the Crown. That's not to say the royal family doesn't privately own some properties, for example Balmoral, but these are not part of the Crown Estate and therefore not part of what we are discussing here.

No, it's pretty clear cut. All properties in the Crown Estate are owned by the Crown. That's not to say the royal family doesn't privately own some properties, for example Balmoral, but these are not part of the Crown Estate and therefore not part of what we are discussing here.

That's theft.

The Queen personally owns those estates from the money out of her own pocket, they aren't taxpayer funded or owned by the government.

Yes we should but this has nothing to do with being a Communist and don't call me "comrade"

The 60p a year per person figure, is a balls out lie

They're not great ambassadors and the rest of the world does not love them nearly as much as the British think they do (The Americans see them as a bit of a joke really, like this country is one big costume drama)

They're not "good" people and their public behaviour is totally contrived to maximise the British people's perception of them

I actually agree with you for once (I think)

If this country did abolish the monarchy, we would not lose the Crown Estate, because it is not the property of Elizabeth Windsor and the money from that legally belongs to the treasury, so she really can piss off

And what is the Crown beyond the semi-personal, semi-public expression of the monarchy, which was until relatively recently indistinguishable from the person of the monarch? You're trying to portray 'the Crown' as some run-of-the-mill public institution like the NHS, but it really can't be easily put into one box. The testimonials I have read before Parliament all seem to indicate an uneasiness among all sorts of lawyers and legal types to be pinned down on one side or another for fear of being made to look silly.

Particularly as part of the Crown Estate at the very least is the royals' and the royals' alone without any shadow of a doubt, which is the Privy Purse lands. But the rest? You could just as equally say it's not the Queen's as much as it's not the State's, and not 'the people''s.

Demonstrate how.

This all sounds very much like personal opinion

It does not legally 'belong' to the treasury. The best that can be said is that it was once inseparable from the monarchy but has evolved into a quasi-independent, quasi-personal entity. That does not mean it therefore defaults to the Treasury.

If, when Satan begins ice skating to work, the monarchy is abolished, I hope that the courts have a fair go at untangling the issue without interference from Parliament.

The Crown, to quote Wikipedia, is "a corporation sole that ... represents the legal embodiment of executive, legislative, or judicial governance." In other words, it's the state. In fact the whole concept of the Crown was literally created to separate the personal property of the monarch from the property of the state. If you abolish the monarchy, you abolish the Crown, and there's absolutely no reason the property of the Crown would go to the monarch rather than to the state.

Because dividing how much the treasury gives them per year, by the number of people in this country doesn't account for the cost of protecting them and the tax exemptions they receive.

To many people they are a symbol of rape, theft and murder.

It's like sending an Irish person a Christmas card with a picture of Oliver Cromwell on the front

Er yes it does

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_Estate

King George III surrendered it to the UK government in return for being absolved of his personal debts and having them added on to the national debt

The cost of security is mixed up with the cost of protecting all VIPs, government officials, ambassadors and so on, in this country. You can't quite simply determine how much the protection of a particular person costs. Anyway, the cost would remain under a republic.

Just like the President of the United States of the President of France, then?

Well just as well they don't, then, because the Queen was a hit in her visit to Ireland

He surrendered the revenue.

The cost of the British monarchy compared with the comparable presidencies is really rather high since they are one high profile extended family, as opposed to just protecting the nuclear family. Also, nicely done on ignoring the other more pertinent point of tax avoidance.

Not really. The president is elected by the people, has a fixed term, then goes. If you can't see the nuance here, then maybe you suffer from a double digit IQ.

It was controversial and the first time a British monarch had visited (The Republic of) Ireland in over 100 years... So that really does say a lot about relations with what should be one of our closest allies. But again, you are missing the point, people from India, the Caribbean, Africa in many cases see them as a symbol of oppression, it didn't mean Ireland specifically, it was an example of how using them as ambassadors is insensitive.

Good, we'll have that for starters, then we can realise that the Queen does not own "The Crown" so she would not even own it legally. Then she can be subject to inheritance tax and none of it really matters.

No. The Crown started as simply the monarch; it has now evolved into something semi-separate from the person, but remains linked nonetheless. It is a corporation sole and a representative one, but that does not mean that, therefore, it belongs to the Treasury or the State, does it?

Which is exactly what I'm trying to say, but you keep ignoring: the problem is not that it will default to the monarch, or to the State: The problem is that the whole combination is so complex and ephemeral that disentangling what is the (former) monarch's from that which defaults to the State would likely take years, if not decades, of legal investigation to determine, if at all.

Ugh, no. The Crown is what we have instead of 'the State' due to the fact we live under a monarchy. That's what you need to understand. We don't actually have a 'The State'. If we abolished the monarchy, it would make sense that the Crown and all of its holdings would become 'the state' - because that's effectively what the Crown is. It would make no sense to rule that the Queen, who never owned any of these properties to begin with, now has complete private ownership of them, just because she was permitted to use them under the old system.

definitely, no place for them in a democracy