The Queen’s position in various ‘rich lists’ may have slipped of late but she – and the monarchy more generally – remain exceptionally wealthy. In this contribution to my ‘greedy bastards’ series I draw on recent research into ‘The Firm’ published in Sociological Review and entitled ‘The Corporate power of the British monarchy: capital(ism), wealth and power in contemporary Britain’ by Laura Clancy).
I have long thought and argued that the UK monarchy and its companion and companionable aristocracy play a critical role in reproducing capitalism’s hierarchies of privilege and desert. If the monarchy was to fall, then much else would crumble in its wake. The Queen’s lack of clothing, like the Emperor’s, would have been revealed.
The wealth holdings of the monarchy + the aristocracy (about which I’ve blogged before) + the church are immense. The obscene, unearned wealth of the Duke of Westminster is a familiar and stand-out example. But what of the monarchy itself? How are we to interpret ‘The Firm’, as it is known? Clancy understands it as part and parcel of the capitalist regime. She understands the monarchy to be a corporation in its own right, and its branding to indicate ‘what they want you to see’. ‘The Firm’ employs around 1,200 staff across the Royal Household, and its organisation reflects bureaucratic multidivisional corporations, with the Queen the equivalent of President, the Lord Chamberlain as Chairman, the Queen’s Private Secretary as Managing Director/Chief Executive, and Heads of Departments as sector managers. Senior staff are head hunted and attract high salaries while junior staff such as assistant housekeepers are paid barely more than the London living wage. Women employees are paid less than men, and the first black equerry was only hired in 2017. Senior and junior staff alike seem motivated in large part by ‘moral economies of class subservience’. Senior staff, unsurprisingly, tend to be recruited from elite schools, landowners and titled families. There is a revolving door between Establishment networks, including transnational corporations and banks. Lines of communication between senior staff and the government and mainstream media are firmly established and well oiled.
The monarchy has been funded by the government since 1688. A fixed payment was introduced to give parliament more control of a monarch’s whims. Between 1760 and 2011, this took the form of a Civil List: an annual payment, rising with inflation, in return for the Crown Estate profits, a portfolio of land and property belonging to the Crown. The last Civil List payment, in 2011, was £7.9 million. In 2011 the Civil List was replaced with the Sovereign Grant: the annual payment is now calculated from a percentage of the Crown Estate’s net income, with the National Audit Office and Public Accounts Committee undertaking regular, if it seems nominal, examinations. The Firm received 15% of the Crown Estate’s net income surplus in 2011, yet in 2017 the Royal Trustees (the Prime Minister, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Keeper of the Privy Purse) agreed to 25% plus an additional 10% annually to fund the 10-year ‘Reservicing of Buckingham Palace’ project. This amounted to £82.2 million in 2018-19, up from £40 million in 2014-15. Clancy cites David McClure, who wrote in the Financial Times: this bears ‘a remarkable resemblance to the generous performance-related pay packages granted to business executives by their indulgent boards’.
Lest we forget, 2010-2020 was the decade of Tory austerity.
Clancy goes into more detail about the monarchy’s finances than it is necessary to rehearse here. Many of its ruses, devices and fiddles would get a working-class person locked up. Prince Andrew ‘worked’ for the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills as a ‘special representative for International Trade and Investment, but this was terminated in 2011 when he was said to have profited personally from deals he brokered. Obviously a great deal more might be said of this self-serving waste of space.
Suffice to say here that the staggering wealth and constant political fuelling of The Firm is typically offset in public discourse against notions of its wider cultural, historical or economic ‘value’ to British society. The Firm exploits ancient prerogatives to reproduce its wealth in contemporary capitalist Britain. Clancy quotes Ellen Meiskins Wood here: Britain has ‘a kind of ‘bastard capitalism’ with a pre-modern state and antiquated ruling ideologies’ that affect the entire system, structuring relations between ‘new’ and ‘old’ elites.
The monarchy, in short, is an archaic, anachronistic, parasitic, corrupt and self-serving institution. It has its own corporate interests: exploiting low-paid employees; the revolving door between the Royal Household and other institutions; clandestine and enigmatic/ambiguous royal finances; networks of ‘abusive’ neocolonialism; and the misuse of political privileges. The wealth of The Firm, Clancy summarises, is wealth ‘made visible’ as institutional and ceremonial classed power.
The monarchy normalises elite wealth and shores up racialised capitalist structures and neocolonial exploitation both economically (goods stolen during Empire) and culturally (patronage visits to Commonwealth nations).
Clancy is surely right to insist on the importance of incorporating an analysis of the contemporary British monarchy into narratives of class-based, obdurate and growing material and social inequalities. If the monarchy were to go, much else would immediately be placed in jeopardy, much to the benefit of ‘the many’.