The Guardian view on paying for the Queen: an embarrassment of riches
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Version 0 of 1. Bagehot’s famous distinction was between the “dignified” and the “efficient” elements of the English constitution – the crown who presides on the one hand, and the ministers who actually decide on the other. Perhaps the contrast should now be recast as that between the constitution’s embarrassable and unembarrassable parts. Properly wary of pinched voters, ministers have just swallowed a five-year pay freeze. MPs first grew ashamed of fixing their own rewards and so outsourced that task, and now that a proposal for a hike has duly come back from the independent arbiters, many vow to eschew the cash if they can’t stop it entirely. Parliamentarians slog away in a crumbling Palace of Westminster, and are fraught about a report that just concluded that taxpayers should be asked to dig deep for billions in overdue repairs. Many members would rather see gargoyles fall to the floor than go to the public with that sort of bill. What a contrast with that other palace, not a mile up the road, where buoyant crown estate profits – courtesy of a British property boom that’s the flipside of Britain’s housing crisis – will facilitate an inflation-busting rise for the Queen. The “crown” is more than the person of the sovereign, and the crown estate is the nation’s asset. But there is a link back to the royal pay packet, because the Treasury earmarks a proportion of the profits for that purpose, while also undertaking to top up income in the event that crown profits drop. The investment disclaimer does not apply: the Queen’s return on crown investments can go up, but not down. After the long squeeze on ordinary incomes, an elected head of state would surely have spent Wednesday figuring out the most popular way to turn this semi-automatic pay rise down. Instead, Buckingham Palace went on the offensive. It emphasised the vast £150m building works that it reckons it needs, adding for good measure that the Queen may have to move out for a time. She’s no shortage of alternative addresses, of course, unlike the parliamentarians who are wishing their own repair bill away instead of waving it around. The palace also reached clumsily for the Scottish card. It pointed out how the post-referendum devolution proposals, reforms backed by all the big parties, will empower Holyrood to run the large Scottish chunk of the estate on different, less commercial criteria, and how this could leave the Queen shortchanged down the road. That would be if, of course, the Treasury failed to make good the losses as it likely will. The Queen sensibly guards most of her views, but she is known to be a unionist. The predictable headlines about Nicola Sturgeon’s raid on her majesty are hardly helpful to the unionist cause. They underline how unearned wealth in London flows down from the glens and foreshore, that loom large in the nationalist imagination. David Cameron’s blundering post-referendum suggestion that Scotland’s big vote had actually been about strengthening English autonomy is one natural point of comparison, but at least that was soon reversed. Elections keep politicians in check. Palaces are not similarly restrained – and the results are not always dignified. |