God Damn The Queen
Elizabeth II's racist legacy of tyranny and terrorism leaves £72.5 billion, 6.6 billion acres to Monarchy PLC.
But the wicked will be cut off from the land and the treacherous will be uprooted from it.
— Proverbs 2:22
“Solemnity is the shield of idiots.”
― Charles-Louis de Secondat Montesquieu
A constitutionally-limited, democratically-elected federal republic is a vastly superior form of government to “constitutional monarchy.” Even if one concedes the laughable notion various statutes, conventions, and legal precedents are equivalent to a supreme constitution, there is no hiding the fact the UK’s so-called constitution is a sham. Consider University College London’s answer to the question, “What is the UK constitution?”
Codified constitutions are typically produced following a major historic turning point, such as the grant of independence, revolution, defeat in war, or complete collapse of the previous system of government. None of these things have happened to the UK, which is why it has never had cause to codify its constitution. (Our one revolution, in the 17th century, did briefly produce a written constitution: Cromwell’s Instrument of Government).
This is the reason why the UK has not felt the need to codify its constitution. But the UK does have a constitution, to be found in leading statutes, conventions, judicial decisions, and treaties. Examples of constitutional statutes include the Bill of Rights 1689, Acts of Union 1707 and 1800, Act of Settlement 1701, Parliament Acts 1911 and 1949, Human Rights Act 1998, Scotland Act, Northern Ireland Act and Government of Wales Act 1998. Examples of conventions include that the monarch acts on ministerial advice; that the Prime Minister sits in the House of Commons; that the Queen appoints as Prime Minister the person most likely to command the confidence of the House of Commons. These and other conventions have themselves been codified in documents such as the Cabinet Manual.
Parliamentary sovereignty is commonly regarded as the defining principle of the British Constitution. This is the ultimate law-making power vested in the UK parliament to create or abolish any law. But parliament can limit its law making power, as in the Human Rights Act; or devolve legislative power, as in the Scotland Act. Other core principles of the British Constitution include the rule of law, the separation of government into executive, legislative, and judicial branches, the accountability of ministers to parliament, and the independence of the judiciary.
(Emphasis added.)
The monarchy has, over the course of centuries, carefully crafted the delusion the Queen or King is a ceremonial figurehead with no political power. Although the sovereignty of Parliament is held up as “the defining principle of the British Constitution,” Parliament has no sovereignty over the monarchy in reality. Parliament is subject to the King’s Consent, a “convention” whereby the monarch secretly and preemptively vets (viz., vetoes) laws “whenever there is a proposal to bring forward legislation affecting the crown's own prerogatives or its interests (hereditary revenues, personal property, or other interests).” Elizabeth II used Queen’s Consent more than 1,000 times during her reign.
More than 1,000 laws have been vetted by the Queen or Prince Charles through a secretive procedure before they were approved by the UK’s elected members of parliament, the Guardian has established.
The huge number of laws subject to royal vetting cover matters ranging from justice, social security, pensions, race relations and food policy through to obscure rules on car parking charges and hovercraft.
They included draft laws that affected the Queen’s personal property such as her private estates in Balmoral and Sandringham, and potentially anything deemed to affect her personally.
The Guardian has compiled a database of at least 1,062 parliamentary bills that have been subjected to Queen’s consent, stretching from the beginning of Elizabeth II’s reign through to the present day.
The database illustrates that the opaque procedure of Queen’s consent has been exercised far more extensively than was previously believed.
In one of the most stark examples of the royals’ political influence over Parliament, Elizabeth II’s ‘lobbying’ in effect blocked a law that would have revealed the true scope of her family’s wealth to the public.
The Queen successfully lobbied the government to change a draft law in order to conceal her “embarrassing” private wealth from the public, according to documents discovered by the Guardian.
A series of government memos unearthed in the National Archives reveal that Elizabeth Windsor’s private lawyer put pressure on ministers to alter proposed legislation to prevent her shareholdings from being disclosed to the public.
Following the Queen’s intervention, the government inserted a clause into the law granting itself the power to exempt companies used by “heads of state” from new transparency measures.
The arrangement, which was concocted in the 1970s, was used in effect to create a state-backed shell corporation which is understood to have placed a veil of secrecy over the Queen’s private shareholdings and investments until at least 2011.
The true scale of her wealth has never been disclosed, though it has been estimated to run into the hundreds of millions of pounds.
Evidence of the monarch’s lobbying of ministers was uncovered by a Guardian investigation into the royal family’s use of an arcane parliamentary procedure, known as Queen’s consent, to secretly influence the formation of British laws.
Unlike the better-known procedure of royal assent, a formality that marks the moment when a bill becomes law, Queen’s consent must be sought before legislation can be approved by parliament.
It requires ministers to alert the Queen when legislation might affect either the royal prerogative or the private interests of the crown.
The website of the royal family describes it as “a long established convention” and constitutional scholars have tended to regard consent as an opaque but harmless example of the pageantry that surrounds the monarchy.
But documents unearthed in the National Archives, which the Guardian is publishing this week, suggest that the consent process, which gives the Queen and her lawyers advance sight of bills coming into parliament, has enabled her to secretly lobby for legislative changes.
Thomas Adams, a specialist in constitutional law at Oxford University who reviewed the new documents, said they revealed “the kind of influence over legislation that lobbyists would only dream of”. The mere existence of the consent procedure, he said, appeared to have given the monarch “substantial influence” over draft laws that could affect her.
‘Disclosure would be embarrassing’
The papers reveal that in November 1973 the Queen feared that a proposed bill to bring transparency to company shareholdings could enable the public to scrutinise her finances. As a result she dispatched her private lawyer to press the government to make changes.
Matthew Farrer, then a partner at the prestigious law firm Farrer & Co, visited civil servants at the then Department of Trade and Industry to discuss the proposed transparency measures in the companies bill, which had been drafted by Edward Heath’s government.
The bill sought to prevent investors from secretly building up significant stakes in listed companies by acquiring their shares through front companies or nominees. It would therefore include a clause granting directors the right to demand that any nominees owning their company’s shares reveal, when asked, the identities of their clients.
Three crucial pages of correspondence between civil servants at the trade department reveal how, at that meeting, Farrer relayed the Queen’s objection that the law would reveal her private investments in listed companies, as well as their value. He proposed that the monarch be exempted.
“I have spoken to Mr Farrer,” a civil servant called CM Drukker wrote on 9 November. “As I had recalled he – or rather, I think, his clients – are quite as concerned over the risk of disclosure to directors of a company as to shareholders and the general public.”
“He justifies this not only because of the risk of inadvertent or indiscreet leaking to other people,” Drukker continued, “but more basically because disclosure to any person would be embarrassing.”
After being informed that exempting only the crown from the legislation would mean it was obvious any shareholdings so anonymised were the Queen’s property, Farrer, the correspondence states, “took fright somewhat, emphasised that the problem was taken very seriously and suggested – somewhat tentatively – that we had put them into this quandary and must therefore find a way out.”
Drukker continued: “He did not like any suggestions that holdings were not these days so embarrassing, given the wide knowledge of, for example, landed property held. Nor did he see that the problem might be resolved by any avoidance of holdings in particular companies. It was the knowledge per se that was objectionable.”
After being informed by Farrer “that he must now seek instruction” from his client, Drukker advised a colleague: “I think we must now do what you suggested we should eventually do – warn ministers.”
Three days later, another civil servant, CW Roberts, summarised the problem in a second memo.
“Mr Farrer was not only concerned that information about shares held for the Queen, and transactions in them, could become public knowledge (since it would appear on the company’s register) and thus the subject of possible controversy,” Roberts wrote.
“He regards any disclosure of beneficial ownership of shares by the crown, even if restricted to the directors of the company, as potentially embarrassing, because of the risk of leaks.”
He continued: “Mr Farrer has accepted an invitation to go into the matter with us, but has said that he will not be able to do so for a few days, until he has taken instructions from his principals.”
Secrecy clause
By the following month the Heath government had developed an ingenious proposal through which the Queen’s dilemma might be resolved.
“With the help of the Bank of England, my department have evolved the following solutions, which will appear in the bill,” wrote the Conservative trade minister Geoffrey Howe to a fellow minister.
Howe proposed that the government would insert a new clause into the bill granting the government the power to exempt certain companies from the requirement to declare the identities of their shareholders.
Officially, the change would be for the benefit of a variety of wealthy investors. “Such a class could be generally defined to cover, say, heads of state, governments, central monetary authorities, investment boards and international bodies formed by governments,” Howe continued.
In practice, however, the Queen was plainly the intended beneficiary of the arrangement. The government intended to create a shell company through which a range of these investors could hold shares. It meant that any curious member of the public would be unable to pinpoint which of the shares owned by the company were held on behalf of the monarch.
“My department have discussed this solution with the legal advisers to the Queen,” Howe noted. “While they cannot of course commit themselves to using the suggested new facility, they accept that it is a perfectly reasonable solution to the problem which they face, and that they could not ask us to do more. I am therefore arranging that the necessary provisions should appear in the bill.”
It would be three years before the bill and its secrecy clause would come into law. In February 1974 Heath called a general election, resulting in all legislation that was going through parliament being thrown out.
However, the proposal was resuscitated by the subsequent Labour government under Harold Wilson and became law in 1976, with much of the original bill simply copied into the second edition.
The exemption was almost immediately granted to a newly formed company called Bank of England Nominees Limited, operated by senior individuals at the Bank of England, which has previously been identified as a possible vehicle through which the Queen held shares.
Shares believed to be owned by the Queen were transferred to the company in April 1977, according to a 1989 book by the journalist Andrew Morton.
The exemption is believed to have helped conceal the Queen’s private fortune until at least 2011, when the government disclosed that Bank of England Nominees was no longer covered by it.
Four years ago, the company was closed down. Precisely what happened to the shares it held on behalf of others is not clear. As a dormant company, it never filed public accounts itemising its activities.
‘A possible landmine’
The use of Queen’s consent is normally recorded in Hansard, the official record of parliamentary debates, before a bill’s third reading. However, no notification of consent for the 1976 bill appears in the record, possibly because it was only sought for the 1973 version that never made it to third reading.
Howe, who died in 2015, appears to have disclosed the role of Queen’s consent – which is invoked when ministers believe a draft law might affect the royal prerogative or the private interests of the crown – during a parliamentary debate in 1975 in a previously unnoticed speech.
“In relation to that draft legislation, as to any other, the advisers of the Queen, as they do as a matter of routine, examined the bill to see whether it contained, inadvertently or otherwise, any curtailment of the royal prerogative,” Howe said.
Howe had been prompted to speak in the parliamentary debate during a row caused by the leak of high-level Whitehall papers to the Morning Star newspaper. The leak revealed the government’s intention to exempt the Windsor wealth from the companies bill.
It was a major scoop for the communist newspaper, but the leaked papers did not establish whether the Queen had lobbied the government to help conceal her wealth.
At the time, the Financial Times remarked that “a possible landmine for the Conservatives would be if Buckingham Palace in 1973 had taken the initiative in suggesting that disclosure of the Queen’s shareholdings should be excluded from the bill”.
The newly discovered papers reveal exactly that. “At the very least, it seems clear that representations on the part of the crown were material in altering the shape of the legislation,” Adams said.
When contacted by the Guardian, Buckingham Palace did not answer any questions about the Queen’s lobbying to alter the companies bill, or whether she had used the consent procedure to put pressure on the government.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the Queen said: “Queen’s consent is a parliamentary process, with the role of sovereign purely formal. Consent is always granted by the monarch where requested by government.
“Whether Queen’s consent is required is decided by parliament, independently from the royal household, in matters that would affect crown interests, including personal property and personal interests of the monarch,” she said.
“If consent is required, draft legislation is, by convention, put to the sovereign to grant solely on advice of ministers and as a matter of public record.”
(Emphases added.)
As a result of the monarchy’s secret political influence over legislation, the public is still in the dark as to the “embarrassing” scope of the royal family’s wealth. Nor does the public know how many of the 1,000+ laws the monarchy vetted were vetoed de facto because Parliament could not or would not stand up to the queen’s secret lobbying. What we do know is the monarchy — or “the Firm,” as the business is known among the royal family — was worth an estimated £72.5 billion ($88 billion at the time) in 2020, according to Forbes. (Forbes’s 2021 estimate of the monarchy’s tangible assets came in at $28 billion.) The Sunday Times rich list estimated Elizabeth II’s personal net worth to be £350 million ($406 million).
However, these estimates are based on known assets, such as Buckingham Palace ($4.9 billion), the Duchys of Cornwall and Lancaster ($2.048 billion), and Kensington Palace ($630 million). In addition, the Crown Estate’s 263,000 acres produced £486.9 million in revenue in 2021, of which 25 percent goes to the monarchy through the Sovereign Grant and 75 percent to the Treasury.
What is not included in estimates of royal wealth are the assets hidden in off-shore tax havens. The Panama Papers revealed Elizabeth II hid millions oversees through a web of shell companies. But the monarchy does not need to hide money off-shore for tax purposes: none of their UK assets are subject to income, capital gains, or inheritance taxes. (The royals make a ‘voluntary contribution’ in lieu of taxes, which, they claim, without providing evidence, is equivalent to their share of taxes.) Between unpaid tax revenue and an estimated £106 million tab for security and protection, which is paid by the taxpayer separate from the Sovereign Grant, the royal family cost the Treasury £345 million ($493 million at the time) in 2017 alone.
Monarchists retort the Royal Family brings in more money through tourism than they cost the taxpayer. But this evidence-free claim does not stand up to scrutiny. VisitBritain’s widely touted £500 million figure for the monarchy’s contribution to tourism included all tickets sold at landmarks with but the barest connection to the monarchy, such as St. Paul’s Cathedral. In any event, £500 million is completely insignificant to the UK’s £127 billion tourism industry. The monarchy’s contribution to tourism is within the margin of error for estimating the size of the industry. Suffice it to say, the monarchy’s marginal contribution to the UK economy does not justify their existence.
On the contrary, the monarchy inhibits the UK’s economic growth by perpetuating private ownership of economic rents. The monarch holds 6.6 billion acres of land across the ‘Common Wealth’ in fee-tail for the Crown (meaning any given monarch cannot sell the land, as it passes by operation of law to the next monarch upon the reigning monarch’s death). This figure represents 18.3 percent of all land on Earth.
For example, Crown lands comprise 89 percent — 8,886,356 square kilometers or 3,431,041 square miles — of Canada. Just look at the map of British Columbia!
It is no excuse to mischaracterize Crown lands as public land belonging to the state. After all, the monarch is the head of state for all ‘Common Wealth’ countries. And, more to the point: as any economically literate person knows, withholding land from use drives up land values and lowers wages, savings, and economic growth.
The truth is the monarchy are leeches on society. They are predatory rent-seekers and free riders — a gang of murderous thugs — who literally road on coat tails to the top using violence and corruption as tools of coercion. Elizabeth II oversaw 17 years of colonization in Africa. As commander-in-chief, she is directly responsible for the violent repression of Africans’ bid for independence, including the Mau Mau massacre in Kenya. She is directly responsible for the deaths of civilians in Yemen whom the Saudi dictatorship murdered with British arms. She is directly responsible for the violent repression of the Irish during The Troubles, including OPERATION BANNER, OPERATION DEMETRIUS, and the Bogside massacre. She wears a crown of jewels stolen from the people she and her predecessor’s subjugated and enslaved, including blood diamonds from South Africa and India.
These are the uncomfortable facts monarchists refuse to address. How can they when there is no room for rational rebuttal? Instead, they create a false reality and try to impose it on the rest of us. Less than 30 minutes after the BBC announced the death of Elizabeth II, a posh hack reminded the country there is still majority support for the monarchy and republicanism remains relatively unpopular. Similarly, Prime Minister Liz Truss, who once called for the end of the monarchy, attributed the UK’s success to Elizabeth II alone in a gross display of bootlicking. (Elizabeth II was “the rock on which modern Britain was built . . . Britain is the great country it is today because of her . . . [she] provided us with the stability and strength we needed.”)
Generations of institutionalized feudalism have brainwashed the English, by and large, with some notable exceptions, into denying their true identity. Although they will rarely admit it, deep down the English know what they are: subjects of monarchy, not citizens of democracy. They serve their monarch like ants serve their queen.
This is Law and Politics. Until next time . . . .