They shamelessly charge the lifeboat service for permission to cross a beach to launch its lifeboats. They can do so because although the beach is public property they have control of it and can extract a profit to add to their great unearned wealth. Six lifeboat stations must pay £600 a year to be able to launch their boats.
The army, the NHS, some state schools, docks, ferries, wind farm and bridge operators are just some of the other entities that must also pay them off in order to operate.
They are the Windsor family and they exploit their control oft he duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster, and the Crown Estate, all public assets, for all that they can shake out of them.
In 2023 the Windsors pocketed £51m from the two duchies to spend on their homes, staff and personal expenses.
Little detailed about these public assets is given in published accounts. But in November 2024 the Sunday Times and the Channel 4 TV Dispatches programme revealed
the most detailed information to date on the Windsor shake-downs.
The newspaper erroneously stated that the duchies and estate are owned by the Windsors. That is not true, although by allowing the Windsors to manage these assets and profit from them the British state creates the impression that they are the owners.
Profiting From Public Assets
The two news media organisations found 5410 land holdings, mineral rights and properties owned by the three public estates. Although the properties are public assets the Windsors profit from them, charging the army, the navy, prisons, hospitals and local councils and other public bodies for the use of lands, rivers and seashores that rightfully belong to the people of this country. Thus public services are made more expensive because their costs are added to by the Windsors extraction of private profit.
The duchies impose charges for crossing a river, for dumping waste in rivers, for unloading cargo, for running cables under a beach and even for grave digging. They demand payment from ferries and from toll roads. More money is extracted from owners of sewage pipes, and from pubs, churches, village halls, distilleries, gas pipelines and wind turbines.
The NHS is seriously short of funds. But the Windsors are happy to profit from it. They are charging £11m over fifteen years for ambulance parking on duchy controlled public property. Another victim of their extortion is The Dorset Fire Authority which has paid the Cornwall duchy £612,000 for a 125 year lease on land for a new fire station.
Some schools must even pay the Windsors for the right to use their buildings and playing fields.
Prison Profits For Windsors
They will extract another £37m over 25 years from the justice ministry in rent for Dartmoor Prison, a facility that was paid for and is owned by taxpayers. For the use of the public land on which the prison stands the Cornwall duchy charges British taxpayers £1.5m a year. The lease also requires that the Ministry of Justice spend at least £68m over ten years on updating the structure.
That duchy’s control of large reaches of seashore allows the head of state to charge the navy £900,000 over 20 years for permission to moor boats at the Royal Naval College, an institution that Charles Windsor attended.
The Navy also pays the family £10,000 a year for permission to refuel its ships at Devonport. Incidentally, William Windsor poses as commader-in-chief of the submarine service, although he is no such thing outside of monarchist fantasy.
The Ministry of Defence contributed £900,000 towards the cost of the building of a jetty at Devonport. Despite that it pays the family £3250 a year for permission to use the jetty. Control of the jetty will revert to the Duchy when the lease expires.
For the privilege of mooring its boats at the Dartmouth naval academy and refuelling them in Devonport dockyard the British navy pays the Cornwall duchy £1m. The army pays to use Dartmoor national park for training soldiers
Charles is the pretend head of the army and his son a pretend lieutenant colonel.
When the Sunday Times made a request to see a Duchy of Cornwall lease, the amount paid and William Windsor’s name had been blanked-out in a sign that they may be embarrassed by their extortion, if not embarrassed enough to forgo the profit.
Money For Movement
The duchies are happy to extract profits for doing nothing. At Liverpool’s cargo port A Windsor takes 30p every time that a crane lifting a container crosses an imaginary line in the air in what is called “the right of oversail”. In addition Windsor takes £150,000 a year from the port regardless of crane movements.
The Mersey Docks and Harbour company has had to pay the duchy £560,000 since 2008 for the right to operate two wind turbines which stand on a river bed that is supposedly owned by the elder Windsor.
A duchy also takes £50000 a year for the use of the Liverpool ferry dock by high-speed ferries to the Isle of Man.
Liverpool Looting
The Merseyside Passenger Transport Executive built the Gerry Marsden Pier for ferry bots and marine rescue boats. But because it was built on the river bed it must pay the duchy for its use. It is much the same story with the Mersey Gateway bridge. The Windsor family profits from that too.
Also in Liverpool United Utilities must pay a duchy £300 a year because one of its outflow pipes crosses the river bed claimed by the duchy.
In Cornwall the duchy there takes a share of the income from tolls collected on the Tamar Estuary bridge just because some bridge cables overhang land the duchy has control of.
Wind farm owners must pay the duchy many millions for permission to run cables across beaches.
There are 2682 parcels of land that they do not own or control where the Windsors still claim the exclusive right to mine for minerals. Ten years ago they wrote to thousands of land owners to warn them that although they might own the land and buildings, the soil and rock beneath were the Windsor’s alone.
Since then one of the duchies has sold for a great profit the right to mine in areas of outstanding natural beauty. Charles Windsor is a patron of two of the charities that have objected to the mining from which the duchy profits. But then he stands to profit by tens of millions of pounds if the mining is successful.
Through the duchies’ property rights the Windsors profit from private as well as public entities. From a barristers chamber, a newspaper distribution warehouse, a beauty company, office blocks, a shopping centre, a colleges, a Scouts hut and filling stations. In some cases the lease allows the duchy to take a share of the tenant’s profits.
In the Scilly Isles they extract profit from a public toilet.
Seized By Medieval Monarchs
The Sunday times reported that the “property empires”controlled by the head of state and his son had been kept secret the extent of the properties they benefit from, which were “largely seized by medieval monarchs”.
These profits are in addition to the annual grant made to the feudal family. In 2023 Charles Windsor took £27m from the Lancaster duchy. His son William pocketed £23.6m from the duchy of Cornwall.
The annual reports of the duchies disclose little about the 180,000 acres that the duchies control. The assets amount to £1.8b. Their properties are exempt from property laws, such as those on compulsory purchase.
In 2005 parliament’s public accounts committee recommended that that the head of state’s son be deprived of this control of the Duchy of Cornwall. That has not happened yet
Although duchies’ property portfolios are public assets, the Sunday Times reported that the property titles and leases prepared for duchy property are in the names of the Windsors, confirming that they think of them as private holding and would attempt to seize them when the monarchy is abolished.
Tax concessions for wealthy Windsors
Although the duchies function as businesses they are exempt from corporation and capital gains tax. So when a duchy sells a property it pays, unlike others, no tax on the profit.
Their tax exemptions also give them an unfair advantage over competing businesses.
Charles Windsor and his son William “voluntarily” pay the income tax that is compulsory for the rest of us on the money they extract, minus deductions for business and household expenses, a seeming concession to justice that is nothing of the sort.
The duchies and the Crown estate belong to the people. The profits are taken by the Windsor.