Prince Charles is personally worth about 60 million above and beyond any compensation given to him by the state. He rides around in a biofuel train with a few of his closest companions and enjoys the high life while preaching to the rest of us about the plight of earth’s ecology. Meanwhile, his lifestyle, which has a carbon footprint roughly 100 times larger than the average British person, is funded by taxpayers.
William is personally worth 40 million. I’m relatively sure he didn’t build that kind of a bank roll from his Royal Air Force salary. This fortune, like his father’s and grandmother’s fortunes, was instead taken from the British people.
There’s the crux of the problem in the end. These people (and their parents, grandparents and so on) never worked a day in their lives for any of this money or power. Instead it was simply given to them because they were born. So, really, when you examine the question of who’s paying for this wedding, it is feasible to argue that the British citizenry is paying the whole bill, not just the security cost.
Sadly, there is an even larger cost than this. This cost is difficult to measure in dollars and cents, but it is certainly more important than money. The whitewashing of the institution of monarchy is the real cost, and the real crime, here. Right next to the endless stream of drivel and gossip about William and Kate’s wedding are stories about people who are dying in an attempt to overthrow monarchies across Africa and the Middle East. Can no one see the tragedy in embracing and romanticizing monarchy in Great Britain while we decry the same institution in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia?
Maybe the British should spend that 33 million on supporting the freedom of people from the tyranny of kings, and maybe the world should stop being obsessed with fairytale royal weddings and work to end monarchy around the world.
