Roz said on another thread:
robin orton and brian clearly want to deflect the argument away from the Royal Family without attempting to justify why on earth we should be funding these events and bank rolling these people. Please can they do so as you simply cannot berate people on £100k on milking the system whilst there are multi milliionaires around who've been doing it for years. If its the 'same old story' from me, its the same old silence from them.
If people want to live their lives through a soap opera there's always Coronation Street. No pun intended. My preferred outcome in respect of royalty is that they exist but cost us substantially less and that people take a more hardened view of them as they tend to do in most European countries that still have a monarchy. Its a matter of national subservience here that seems to fit in with and shape the British character.
That to me is realistic and a starting point. There persists in the country a view that these people have a moral right to have financial and societal superiority over us.
If you have a hereditary head of state, you automatically have a royal family, and therefore you have royal weddings, royal births, royal rows, royal illnesses, royal deaths, royal adulteries, royal divorces, etc. People take a natural interest in the dramas of other people's family life, particularly if we feel we all know them and when something particularly exciting is happening in them. You can call this 'living their lives through a soap opera' if you like, but I think that may be a bit patronizing.
As to your concern that 'we are bankrolling these people' and that there 'persists in the country a view that these people have a moral right to have financial and societal superiority over us', I think heads of state do need to have a degree of 'societal superiority' in that they need to command respect and to be in a position to give a moral lead in times of national crisis. As to the money, I don't know whether you think the royal family have an extravagant lifestyle; nor do I know whether, to the extent that they do, it is paid for by the tax payer rather than from their private resources. OK, for historical reasons, our royal family (like, I suspect, many others) have quite a lot of personal wealth, but not as much as a lot of other people in this country who I at least would not think are, generally speaking, any more deserving. I think the royal family, particularly the Queen, do a difficult job pretty well on the whole.
Search
Help
| 
