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Where did the Queen get millions to bail out Andrew? | Public Service Private Wealth

Prince Andrew this week settled his court case vs Virginia Giuffre, with an enormous payout reported to be $10-15m.  The Queen  is to help Prince Andrew pay his settlement, and his massive legal fees, however this will come from her own private wealth and the sale of his Swiss Chalet, and not from taxpayers funds.

Which begs the obvious question – where does the Queen get that kind of money?  The monarchy is an institution devoted to public service on behalf of the nation, and not a private money making scheme, so where did this cash come from?

The principle that the monarch should not exploit their position to amass a private fortune goes back to the earliest days of the constitutional monarchy – Bad King John’s path to Runnymede to sign the Magna Carta and Charles I walk to the executioners block both started with fights over what was the Monarchs own funds and what belonged to the country as a whole.

The modern constitutional monarchy is defined by the Act of Settlement passed after the Glorious Revolution of 1689.    One of they key principles of the Act is that the monarch should have no private funds of their own, only those voted for by Parliament.   This was a crucial constitutional check, because it meant that the monarch could not pursue their own policies or act without the approval of Parliament.  The King using his own money to run their own policies was a key factor in the confrontation between Charles I and Parliament which led to the English Civil War and his execution.

Instead of private wealth the monarch was allocated funds from Parliament.   No monarch for the next 200 years amassed a private fortune – in fact all of them died in debt, which had to be settled by Parliament posthumously.   In 1760 in order to settle the debts of George II the Monarchy relinquished nearly all of their land and holdings to form the Crown Estate, the proceeds of which went to the Treasury.

The first constitutional monarch to be massively wealthy was Queen Victoria, Empress of India.   During her reign the Civil List was increased to over £400k per year, an enormous sum in the C19th, which made her the richest woman in the world.   There were breathless stories in the foreign press about her private investments, including New York skyscrapers, but pinning them down is very difficult, and many of them look to be lurid exaggerations.   When she died she passed on mostly property like Balmoral, and jewellery bought from her Civil List allowance.

After WW1 most of the great Royal Houses of Europe were overthrown, and the position of the British Royal family was fragile. The rules on private wealth were slackened to allow the Royal House a contingency if they ever had to go into exile, for example if the Battle of Britain was lost and Hitler had invaded the King Emperor would have gone to Canada to try and rally the Empire from there. Their limited private funds were to allow them to live if Britain fell to war or revolution.

The monarchy become more and more circumspect about their wealth; they were wealthy from the civil list, but not conspicuously so.   George VI complained bitterly about his lack of funds after he had to buy Balmoral and Sandringham from the abdicated Edward VIII.   He also felt the need to forgo a years payments from the Civil List in solidarity with his citizens hardship in the Great Depression.

By 1970 the wealth of QEII over and above the Civil List was estimated at £2m, nearly £30m in todays money.   She was wealthy but not super wealthy.    This looks to be typical for C20th monarchs.   

And then the law changed.  

In 1973 the palace successfully lobbied the Heath Government to make the monarchs private financial affairs secret.  Since then not only are current finances protected from scrutiny, but the release of historic papers under the 30 year rule are limited.

We do know that her net worth has increased in real terms more than 10 fold to somewhere around £400m.   Much of this comes from the Duchy of Lancaster, and other landed properties, including Sandringham and Balmoral, but she has huge fortunes in rare stamps, a horse racing stud, vintage sport cars., jewellery and one of the best private art collections in the World.  

Since 1993 the Queen has paid a sum of money equivalent to her tax bill back to the treasury on the proceeds of her private wealth

The Sovereign Grant Act 2011 brought the law in line with reality by limiting the public contribution to the costs of the monarchy but recognising their private wealth as legitimate.

The Royal Families private wealth would have been a huge scandal 100 years ago, but we just shrug and accept that members of the Royal Family exploit their position for private gain, and that the Prince of Wales uses his Royal Palaces to sell chipolata sausages.

Despite all of this I do have  a lot of admiration for her.   I think she will be remembered as Queen Elizabeth the Great, the last really great European Crowned Head.  A tiny old lady who lived her life completely separate from the population of the country she leads, never interacting with them in any meaningful way, and yet somehow leading the nation through huge radical and irreversible changes.  Always changing, always the same.    

This awful business with Andrew should never have been allowed to drag on this long, if he was going to settle with a massive payment he should have done so years ago, not now.    The Queens’ connection with the nation, and her judgement of it’s moods and currents might be as astute as ever, but the judgement of Andrew is catastrophic and it remains to be seen if Charles is any better when he ascends to the throne.  

The financial opacity and the use of public office to amass private wealth is a huge problem.   Our current Government of chancers are using their offices to make themselves and their mates wealthy.   If the Monarch is doing the same then it sets an example that politicians will follow.   Her ability to be a figurehead and role model for our national values is tarnished by the pursuit of private cash.

And now that this aspect of the Act of Settlement has been over turned it paves the way for King Charles, a reactionary paleo-conservative, to fulfil his ambition to shake off the restrictions on political interference.  

The monarchy, the BBC, the NHS and the CodE form a set of plural institutions that bind us together even if we each disagree with at least one of them.  These shared institutions are in a bad way right now, and how cohesion as a nation is the weaker for it.   It used to be that Conservatives believed in plural and cohesive institutions, but right now it is the Conservative party reborn as authoritarian English nationalists who are breaking them up.  

There may be left wing republicans quietly enjoying the Monarchy’s travails right now, but right now we need our shared institutions to bring us together, not fragment us even further.

Tony Blair | Was he really an evil warmonger?

The House of Commons is currently pondering whether to start impeachment procedures against Boris Johnson following his disastrous Supreme Court defeat. Ironically Boris Johnson along with George Galloway were behind an attempt to impeach Tony Blair over the Iraq War.

This attempt failed, but I still get people who tell me that Tony Blair is a war criminal, who lied to Parliament in a sinister neo-liberal conspiracy to deceive Britain in order to take us into a war for oil.

I hear these statements from time to time, sometimes from the right, sometimes from the left. People’s belief in this version of events is untroubled by any of the investigations that have taken place from Butler, Hutton, Chilcott, or the Foreign Affairs Select Committee.

I don’t really share this view, but I do wonder – how different was Blair’s foreign policy from other Prime Ministers? How does he compare to other Labour PMs? Was there anything unusual about Blair’s foreign policy that made it more violent or bloody than other post war Prime Ministers?

To answer the question I created an index comparing the number of military interventions for each post war Prime Minister. I then added the deaths that occurred after that intervention. This isn’t an exact science, for example for the Afghan war I have excluded deaths in the conflict before the UK and US intervened. There is something very uncomfortable about that – ignoring the million who died in Iraq before Western intervention in order to count only those who died since. Despite this I can’t think of a better way of doing it. I also included policy interventions that weren’t conventional wars, but where the decision led to violent deaths, for example the partition of India, or sending the troops into Northern Ireland

This gives us this table:

You might spot that there are 3 PMs who aren’t on the list; May, Brown and Callaghan. They managed to serve as PM without sending any troops anywhere. Callaghan holds the record for the longest time spent as PM without a military intervention.

We should really adjust for length of term as PM, which gives us this:

I’ve tidied the table up to make it easier to see the relative scores per PM:

These are the countries we have been at war with the most times:

As you can see Attlee was a right bloodthirsty bastard, Thatcher was basically a hippie pacifist and Iceland are a major threat to world peace.

This gives a slightly odd perspective, so breaking it down by decade and region:

If we look at the trend British foreign policy gets progressively less violent, until Major:

This matches the global trend – wars are less frequent and less bloody over time.

I would probably use the data to split the post war era into 4 periods:

1. Attlee and the post war aftermath
2. Churchill, Eden, Macmilan, Douglas Hume: post colonial misadventures
3. Wilson, Health, Callghan, Thatcher: give peace a chance
4. Major, Blair, Cameron: wars in Arab countries, break up of Yugoslavia

Blair is the second most trigger happy PM of the post war era, after Attlee, who is remarkably violent. His foreign policy however is little different to Major, which is to say that both react to the disintegration of Yugoslavia and events in the Middle East with reactive military deployments.

My personal view is that the decision to go to war in Iraq was a massive, and tragic mistake. However I don’t think that it was different to many other decisions to deploy troops in the post war era – a too hasty decision, based on flawed information, without thinking through the consequences.

It was however the first decision to go to war taken after the Freedom of Information Act, and Public Inquiries Act 2005, which gave people the ability to interrogate political decisions to a greater extent than ever before. Attlee’s decision to involve Britain in the Greek Civil War involved misleading Parliament, and lying to the public. The fight against the Mau Mau involved actions that looked much like War crimes. We didn’t find out about these events for 30 years afterwards, by which time politics had moved on, the PMs were dead, and their reputations weren’t affected by them.

Personally I think that this is a good thing.

Since the Iraq war inquiry British Governments have been notably more reluctant to deploy troops, and the House has assumed the convention that a vote is needed before deployment. The defeat of Cameron by Ed Milliband over the bombing in Syria was a huge turning point, and Ed’s major contribution to politics.

After all of this I am still perturbed by the statistics for the pre-Wilson era. I grew up with a particular view of the end of Empire; the Attlee Government started the process of giving up Empire after WW2 driven by a mixture of anti-Imperialist principle and pragmatic realism.

It might have been a mess, particularly in India, but essentially we meant well. The voluntary withdrawal from Empire was a good thing, recognising that we shouldn’t have had an Empire in the first place.

Subsequent Tory administrations might have been less keen on decolonisation, but once the process was started there was no way back.

This is a positive, almost idealist liberal view, that Britain saw that Empire was wrong and did the right thing.

The death toll tells a different story. Our disengagement with Empire was violent, and brutal. Attlee made mistakes, but his Conservative successors indulged in post colonial blood shed, for little reward.

I think that there might be another view of Empire, less commonly spoken of. For people who lived through the end of Empire there was a sense of loss. That once being British meant being something special, the end of Empire was something to fight against. No longer did being white and British mean you were part of a superior race.

The descent from being the greatest nation on the planet to the sick man of Europe, begging for EU membership was a source of humiliation.

Maybe we need to acknowledge that for a group in the UK the retreat from Empire wasn’t a graceful or noble endeavour, but a source of humiliation, to be resisted violently.

I don’t think we fully understand how much this world view still haunts the politics of voters who grew up as Empire was ending.

https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2018/Human%20Costs%2C%20Nov%208%202018%20CoW.pdf

https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20171123123237/http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/61171/wmdreview.pdf

https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200203/cmselect/cmfaff/813/813we20.htm

https://www.theguardian.com/hutton/documents/0,,1021218,00.html

https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200203/cmselect/cmfaff/813/813.pdf

https://www.loc.gov/item/2008354011/