According to news media reports the wedding of Henry Windsor and Meghan Markle will cost taxpayers £25m for security alone at a time when public services are cracking under the pressure of austerity financing.
With the indifference to public good that is typical of the family the wedding is to be held in the Berkshire town of Windsor, rather than London, where protecting Markle and Windsor would be less difficult and so less expensive.
They have also chosen to have a two-mile parade through the streets of the town in order to maximise the public relations value of the wedding. That will greatly complicate the task of the police and the cost to taxpayers.
Five thousand police officers will be taken away from protecting citizens in order to protect a couple who have chosen to make their marriage a public affair.
Although the Windsors have said that they will pay the other wedding costs all expenses will in reality fall upon the taxpayers as the family gets almost all of its income from public assets such as the Crown Estate, the Duchy of Cornwall and the Duchy of Lancaster.
At the time of the last major Windsor wedding in 2011 a Metropolitan police commander instructed citizens that they must feel “joy” about the occasion. And a number of republicans who refused were put in preventative custody by the police in order to suppress the expression of opposition to feudal privilege.
When a former head of the Metropolitan Police Windsor protection squad can keep a straight face while claiming that “Clearly 99 percent of the population are deliriously happy” about the wedding it is to be feared that there will similar police abuses this time.
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