With Keir Starmer off to Samoa for a meeting, the Labour Party and Tory deputies faced off at Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs). The results were a vomit-inducing spectacle around a certain Charles Windsor.
A PMQs king Charles “Love in”
We say ‘face off’, but as Angela Rayner literally said:
Mr Speaker, I’m loving this love-in
One moment that was particularly revealing for those who view Labour and Tory as largely now two sides of the same coin was Oliver Dowden singing ludicrous praise for king Charles:
I’d like to turn to somebody I hope we can all agree is a hard working person, his majesty the King
And Rayner responded:
I will agree with my right honourable friend, the King does a tremendous job
The monarchy is a toxic symbol of unearned privilege and hierarchy that functions to legitimise those same anti-meritocratic tendencies in the Tory party.
To name a few of those tendencies: advancing private healthcare, maintaining private education, and overseeing hundreds of thousands if not millions in unearned inheritance. 60% of private wealth is inherited. And here’s Labour ‘working-class hero’ Rayner agreeing whole-heartedly with Dowden.
To say Charles earns the £350m tax free grant from the public purse he gets every year through “hard work” is an insult to every brickie, sparkie, and engineer in the country. And some form of royal payment has been going on since 1760. Before then it was even worse. The monarch actually fully owned the assets of the Crown Estate, instead of the blurring private-public ownership we have now, where the monarchy transfers net profits to the Treasury.
Not to mention Charles receives £28m per year from estates that the Dutchy of Lancaster oversees. And he is a serial landlord. This is passive, unearned income from owning personal assets – far from “hard working”. As the Guardian reports:
Taking into account the many rental properties, the farmland, commercial rentals and the grand mansions, Charles has inherited an estate worth between £250m and £390m, according to valuation experts.
The ‘work’ Charles actually does is largely ceremonial and symbolic, hardly ‘earning’ hundreds of millions per year.
That said, the monarchy does have the very real power to veto laws, as revealed in 2013.
Instead of the current arrangement, the head of state should be elected to oversee circumstances such as parliamentary transitions.
Featured image via the i paper – YouTube
