Royal Rumble: EU Monarchs behaving badly

Published on April 13, 2014

Politics

De­spite cer­tain pos­i­tive ex­am­ples such as King Juan Car­los’ in­stru­men­tal role in the cre­ation of democ­racy in Spain, monar­chi­cal med­dling in pol­i­tics is frowned upon nowa­days. How­ever, in the UK Prince Charles has fre­quently been ac­cused of in­ter­fer­ing, and an on­go­ing cam­paign by the Guardian to pub­lish his let­ters to MPs won a re­cent vic­tory after the orig­i­nal ban was de­clared un­law­ful. Al­most un­be­liev­ably, their pub­li­ca­tion had been pre­vi­ously re­fused on the basis that they could cast doubt upon his po­lit­i­cal neu­tral­ity, and as such harm his abil­ity to per­form fu­ture du­ties as king.

How­ever, over the years it has been the roy­als per­sonal rather than po­lit­i­cal ex­ploits that have gar­nered neg­a­tive press. Prince William and Charles re­cently did the very am­i­ca­ble deed of tak­ing a stand against il­le­gal poach­ers, and mak­ing a heart­felt ap­peal for the pro­tec­tion of an­i­mals around the world. Per­haps it might have felt more sin­cere had Prince William not been romp­ing around Spain shoot­ing wild boar only 24 hours ear­lier. What’s more in­ter­est­ing is the fact that the ap­peal ac­tu­ally ap­plies di­rectly to the King of Spain, whose re­peated ele­phant hunt­ing jaunts to Botswana lost him his role as hon­orary pres­i­dent of the Span­ish WWF.

Rob­bing for the rich

In an on­go­ing cor­rup­tion trial his daugh­ter, Princess Christina, re­cently be­came the first mem­ber of the royal fam­ily to be ques­tioned in court. Ac­cu­sa­tions are that her hus­band used a not-for-profit or­gan­i­sa­tion of which he was pres­i­dent to rip off the re­gional gov­ern­ments of Va­len­cia and the Balearic Is­lands for per­sonal gain. It’s claimed the cou­ple then used this money to pay for any­thing from util­ity bills to the re­mod­el­ling of their home, on which they spent a total of €9 mil­lion. In No­vem­ber of last year it was seized as part of a civil bond to pay for their court fees.

Al­though this cor­rup­tion is par­tic­u­larly poignant given the back­ground of Spain’s soar­ing debts and al­most 30% un­em­ploy­ment, it’s also im­por­tant to re­mem­ber that their royal fam­ily is the cheap­est of any Eu­ro­pean monar­chies. Sev­eral years of cuts have left them with a bud­get of €7.78 mil­lion for 2014, mak­ing them com­par­a­tively im­pov­er­ished against their UK coun­ter­parts, who can look for­ward to £37.9 mil­lion of the tax­payer’s money over the same pe­riod. Worse still, the Nether­lands’ pop­u­la­tion is two thirds smaller than Spain’s but the Dutch King and Queen re­ceive four times as much tax payer money.

Even more strik­ing is a re­cent par­lia­men­tary re­port that high­lighted just how poor the British Royal Fam­ily are in the man­age­ment of their fi­nances. The re­port con­cluded that the Crown “needs to get a much firmer grip on how it plans to ad­dress its back­log of prop­erty main­te­nance.”  It also said “there is scope for the House­hold to gen­er­ate more in­come and re­duce its costs fur­ther.” Hardly sur­pris­ing given that only a smat­ter­ing of Buck­ing­ham Palace’s 775 rooms are open for pub­lic vis­its, and even then for only two months of the year. What’s more, over­spend­ing last year led to the Palace dip­ping into its cash re­serves, leav­ing them at the his­tor­i­cal low of £1 mil­lion.

EU Agri­cul­tural Funds for Roy­als

In­ter­est­ingly, the money that funds these regal lifestyles isn’t only com­ing from their own cit­i­zens. Here we’ll turn our gaze to the hulk­ing EU wide fund of the Com­mon Agri­cul­tural Pol­icy, which takes up 40% of the EU’s en­tire bud­get. Aside from Spain, Britain is the coun­try with the least equally dis­trib­uted land in Eu­rope, with 70% of it being held by only 0.28% of the pop­u­la­tion, and the av­er­age British house­hold con­tributes £245 a year to the CAP.

In 2012, a free­dom of in­for­ma­tion re­quest from the New States­man found large re­cip­i­ents of the scheme to in­clude the Duke of West­min­ster, who in 2012 added £748,716 to his £7.4 bil­lion wealth thanks to it. In the same year the Queen re­ceived £415,817 and the Duchy of Lan­caster £314,811. On top of this, until a 2015 re­form comes into place there is no ne­ces­sity for these landown­ers to ac­tu­ally en­gage in any farm­ing ac­tiv­ity to re­ceive ben­e­fits. It’s a sim­ple mat­ter of the more they own, the more they re­ceive. De­spite an EU Com­mis­sion pro­posal to cap the total sub­sidy any large farmer can re­ceive at €300,000, op­po­si­tion from lobby groups meant it didn’t get into the final re­form bill.

Ev­i­dently, none of the above makes for great press, and his­tor­i­cally it tends to be the case that peo­ple need to per­ceive some kind of ac­tive wrong­do­ing on the part of their mon­archs to achieve a suf­fi­cient de­sire to over­throw them. How­ever, it seems in­dig­na­tion isn’t wide­spread enough to usher in any kind of re­pub­li­can rev­o­lu­tion in the near fu­ture. In fact, the Queen’s re­cent Di­a­mond Ju­bilee and the “royal baby” mania that gripped the world last year has led to some of the most favourable opin­ions ever to­wards the British Royal Fam­ily. Around two thirds be­lieve the UK to be bet­ter off as a monar­chy, and only 17% would see a re­pub­lic as prefer­able. This is cou­pled with high con­fi­dence in the in­sti­tu­tion’s fu­ture longevity, with only 14% of Britons be­liev­ing the monar­chy will be abol­ished by 2070 (in­ter­est­ingly in the same YouGov sur­vey 15% think we’ll have made con­tact with alien life by then).

De­spite any wrong­do­ings and scan­dals, it’s still seems they’re be­hav­ing no worse than our elected rep­re­sen­ta­tives, with cor­rup­tion, sex­ual abuse and mis­use of pub­lic of­fice hav­ing rocked many Eu­ro­pean par­lia­ments over re­cent years. The fact we don’t get to pub­licly elect which mon­archs’ pock­ets our money is fun­nelled into just makes it all the more dis­tress­ing. Whilst we can’t vote them out in the short term, it cer­tainly ought to make their po­si­tions more pre­car­i­ous in the long run.

The British Royal Family enjoy a day at a snake farm in 1947