Should we abolish the Royal family?

[Kev]

What you have to understand is that Miles holds ideals that do not need to be held up to financial or practical scrutiny.

But if we didn't have the monarchy it's a fair bet that whoever became our head of state would have to be paid many times more to do the job.

Let's look at public offices as an example.

Our prime minister, like our queen is paid a modest salary considering the importance of his position, £142,500 per year. Cabinet ministers get £134,565

These salaries reflect the fact that the job they do is paid for by the tax payer, and should not be excessive.

Now let's look at what happens in the public services.

Currently there are a staggering 1700 council workers who receive a wage of greater than £100,000 per year. One executive in Cornwall earns over £410,000 or over 3 times the amount of the prime minister.

Let's look at Europe. The foreign secretary William Hague earns £134,565 per year for his role. The EU secretary Baroness Ashton earns a staggering £230,702 for doing what is essentially a non job.

Even more outrageous she has over 100!!! staff members working for her who earn more than William Hague and the Prime Minister!

How can this excess possibly be justified?

If we abolished the Royal Family, the position of Head of State still needs to be filled. We still need diplomats and dignitaries but now they would be employed with public funds and paid in accordance to the scales above. Furthmore they would no longer be politically neutral but would represent a political party, have their own stance on Europe and other agendas etc.

It would be an infinitely worse system, a tremendously bad idea, but this does not matter to Miles because he has his ideals and they are not subjected to such criticism. They are altogethy too lofty and virtuous for such things.

it would also cost a hell of a lot of money to abolish and replace in the first place

so in summary, it would cost lots to do, and cost more to be different, and be less financially profitable

Yes the initial upheaval would be in the billions of pounds as the government would need to buy property from the crown, pay vast sums of rent and/or move into alternative buildings.

The first problem would be where to actually run parliament seeing as the Crown owns Westminster. So that would need to be bought from the Royals or else the whole government would have to move somewhere else.

Of course any upheaval of this magnitude would have to be subject to a referendum which would cost hundreds of millions of pounds also, with the result far from guaranteed. The people would most likely oppose so to go against them would lead to the court of human rights and british courts becoming involved leading to further action.

It's possible the most loyal of the Commonwealth nations would also object mightily wondering how their relations with Britain might be affected.