Want Female Windsors to Have Share
The Parliamentary Accounts Committee wants to end discrimination against female members of the Windsor clan. It says that if one becomes first in line to be Britain’s head of state, she should be able to pocket annual income of as much as £18m from the Duchy of Cornwall. That would bring the “historic institution, more in line with the expectations of the present day” said Committee chairperson Margaret Hodge, a Labour Party legislator. At present females are not allowed to become dukes and so collect the income from this duchy.
The Committee also wants the Treasury to examine whether competitors to the Cornwall duchy are adversely affected by the special tax status of Charles Windsor, its beneficiary. The estate is exempt from corporation and capital gains tax.
The Treasury should also look into the Estate’s financial strategy, the committee said. And it called for more clarity about Windsor’s unusual tax returns in which income and value added tax are not shown separately.
But the people’s representatives wilfully closed their eyes to the elephant in the committee room, the extraordinary amounts of the people’s money that the Windsors take as their own. It seems that the legislators’ “expectations of the present day” allow for continued looting by the family they recognise as “royal”.
Members of Parliament would have plenty to say about bankers taking home £18m a year even though it was private money. But when it comes to payouts for which they have direct responsibility, when it’s public money that is being looted, they fear to do more than question the fine details. The monarchy remains the third rail of British politics.
Meanwhile in Spain, a judge has frozen the assets of the monarch’s son-in-law as police enquiries into embezzlement continue.