| > The fact that over 60% of people like to live in a country where birth defines a family's worth as higher than everyone else is mind boggling. On a more uplifting note, polls indicate that this support has been slowly declining in recent years, particularly amongst the younger age groups:
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2021/0... I'm British and not part of that 60%, and am fervently hoping this support declines more rapidly when the current monarch dies in the next few years or so. I think a lot of the respect for the monarchy here is driven by a personal respect for the Queen. The rest being our deep-seated cultural problem of class deference. My personal opinion is that in addition to abolishing the monarchy, the state should seize all of their private assets, and every member of the royal family should be exiled. This is probably an even less popular opinion, but I think it's the only proper way to rid Britain of this parasitic family. > Are any of the 60% around that could explain their thoughts? If you ask a monarchist, they'll usually lean on one of two arguments: the financial and the traditional. The former is the flawed belief that the monarchy is a money-maker for the UK and that it would be financially imprudent to abolish them. Usually this argument is based on the Crown Estate providing income for the Treasury, and the implied assumption that if the monarchy were abolished then that income would be gone, even though the lands are still there and there's no reason why the new republican government couldn't just seize the Estate as part of this abolishment. There's also the tourism income conjecture, but plenty of ex-monarchies have a strong tourism sector, and presumably there'd be a Royal Family Museum for tourists to visit in the new republic. The latter is driven by cultural inertia and tends to be what monarchists lean on when the financial argument has been demolished. The talking points usually revolve around who would be the next head of state then, how could Britain possibly function without the monarchy, and so on. Perhaps some monarchists would disagree with this characterisation of their beliefs, but having argued with many of them, these are my observations. |
once the precedent has been set, how about they seize your family's assets too?