02.07.2026
Obscene wealth not main problem
Instead of showing how ‘transparent’ the royal family is, writes Carla Roberts, the release of the tax returns of Charles III and William Mountbatten-Windsor shows how vulnerable this abhorrent institution really is
Publishing the tax returns of king Charles III and his heir, William Mountbatten-Windsor, is apparently down to “a commitment to transparency” and to “encourage wider understanding of our accountability”. We are also assured that the annual amount of taxpayers’ money paid to the royal family (via the ‘sovereign grant’) will “fall dramatically” next year, from £137.9 million this year to just under £100 million in 2027-28.1 Looks like a bargain - if we ignore the fact that, just three years ago, the figure stood at £51.8 million.
Not even the most royal-loving media outlets managed to publish the news that the monarch had agreed to pay £12.9 million in 2024-25 without at least pointing out that this is astonishingly little tax, considering that his overall fortune is estimated to be at least £1.8 billion. The hedge fund boss, Suneil Setiya, paid £114 million despite his similar wealth.2 It turns out that Charles pays absolutely no tax on the vast majority of his income - just like ‘dear mama’ before him (see below).
The finances of the monarchy are famously obscure - and deliberately so. Like the institution itself, it is purposefully shrouded in secrecy and obfuscation - or ‘mystery’, as they would have it. We are supposed to believe that this is almost a ‘natural’ state of things, based on ‘ancient’ tradition.
But things have changed in the last few years - and rather dramatically so. Gone are the days where the royals would even try to tell us that £100 million equates to an expenditure of ‘under £1.50 per person’ in Britain. This sudden embrace of what passes for transparency is designed to paper over the massive cracks that have opened up in recent years. The monarchy is not about to fall - but it is certainly in trouble.
Elizabeth II used to stick to the motto, ‘never explain, never complain’ - she was very aware that the less the public knows about the royals, the better. Show yourself in bright colours, wave, make inane small talk and then have yourself driven back to some palace and firmly shut the doors.
But her offspring are far less disciplined. The 90s were dominated by messy royal affairs, public divorces and the death of the “people’s princess”. Then grandson Harry had enough and made a very public ‘Megxit’, proving that being born a Mountbatten-Windsor does not mean you have to stick with this deeply dysfunctional family and endure life in the hypercritical public eye. He even dared voice some mild, if self-centred, criticisms. In his book, Spare, and a number of interviews, he complained about the monarchy’s “institutional racism”, lack of mental health support for his suicidal wife, and physical altercations with his brother - portraying William (the future king, no less) as an uncaring brute.
In recent months, The Guardian in particular has also exposed the fact that most members of the royals - even ‘non-working’ ones - enjoy free accommodation in the various palaces, thanks to the taxpayer. Then there is, most damagingly, the ongoing scandal around ex-prince Andrew and his lucrative friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. Much of the media has focused on the horrific and systematic abuse of vulnerable young women. While he continues to deny that he had sexual relations with any of them, the fact that his mother paid £12 million to Virgina Roberts (Giuffre) to settle a civil sexual assault lawsuit speaks volumes. In the process, his lawyers did everything in their power to trash Roberts’ reputation, and her suicide in April this year has understandably been linked to such treatment.
In comparison, his incredible 10 years as the government’s official ‘trade envoy’ - despite not having any relatable qualifications or discernible understanding of economics - has come under far less scrutiny. It is clear enough though that he used the unpaid role to travel the world for free (all expenses paid by the taxpayer), meet female ‘friends’ of Jeffrey Epstein - and make profitable connections and a number of ‘deals’ on the side.
Publishing the fact that Charles and William are paying (very small) amounts of tax is supposed to show that some of them do take responsibility, you see. As is prince William’s oh-so wonderful charity, Earthshot Prize (which hands over £1 million every year to a particularly ‘green’ capitalist company in a glitzy gala, to which he and many other celebs fly by private jet), or his campaign to “eradicate homelessness” - not by opening up the palaces or using the many empty houses on his ‘duchy of Lancaster’, of course - that would be too obvious. No, by “bringing businesses together”. The lovely princess Kate meanwhile travels up and down the country to teach mums that “early childhood” really matters and if they mess things up by living in poverty, for example, well, they are basically to blame themselves if their kids turn to a life of crime.
For now, the public still laps it up - support for the monarchy has slightly fallen overall, but is still at just over 50%, depending on the news of the week. For young people, however, the picture is different: among 18- to 34-year-olds, approval is persistently down to 33%. The liberal campaign, Republic, has certainly made a difference and it is good to see their yellow placards whenever Charles shows his face (though we entirely disagree with their proposal to replace the monarch with an elected head of state).
There are many on the left who dismiss the fight to abolish the monarchy as secondary at best - some kind of diversion from the ‘real’ class struggle. But communists should make a real effort to understand how the crown works and how the royals are financed. Not because we have any illusions that ‘this money could be spent on building x amount of hospitals’, which is how much of the economistic left comments on the monarchy, if they comment at all. Many believe it is some kind of feudal leftover that will eventually just crumble and die.
These attitudes are profoundly wrong. For a start, in today’s conditions, the money would more likely be spent on the military. Arguing on a mainly financial basis also opens you up to the charge that, actually, the monarchy might be a money-maker for the British economy (tourism, etc, etc).
Also, today’s monarchy is profoundly ‘modern’ - it has changed dramatically over the centuries in an effort to stop it being abolished by revolutionary pressure from below (as happened in many countries). As Rosa Luxemburg insisted, we stand against the monarchy not on the basis of cost, but as a matter of principle and, even more fundamentally, on the basis of democracy.
The monarchy in Britain possesses substantial reserve political powers. The idea, for example, that Jeremy Corbyn was ever going to be allowed to become prime minister was pure fantasy. Not least because it is the monarch that decides, albeit after taking advice from the privy council, about who to call to the palace to form a government. And just imagine for a moment that he had actually been in a position where the majority of the parliamentary Labour Party supported him as prime minister: we would still have been in a situation where the army swears loyalty to the monarch, not to the government. To all intents and purposes, a legal coup can be carried out through the monarch. We live in a parliamentary ‘democracy’ based on the crown in parliament.
The fight to abolish the monarchy goes to the heart of our vision of socialism as the rule of the working class. Which means the left needs to start taking very seriously the issue of how we are ruled, and by whom. The monarchy is not just a problem when one of the royals messes up: it is an institutional bulwark against popular sovereignty and democratic control. The fight to abolish the monarchical system, the house of lords and the entire secret state must go hand in hand with the fight to democratise society, going down to each and every workplace.
Origins and scale of their finances
T he core of royal assets stems from the Norman Conquest in 1066, when William the Conqueror claimed all the land as “crown property”, later parcelling it out to loyal nobles: 70% of the land in Britain is still owned by 1% of the population.3
In 1760 king George III was forced to surrender management and revenues of the crown’s lands to the government. In return, parliament cleared his substantial debts and granted him a fixed annual income previously known as the ‘civil list’ (now the ‘sovereign grant’).
The crown estate is one of the biggest landowners and worth £16.7 billion. It includes vast areas of London real estate, the majority of the UK seabed and over half of the UK’s foreshore. Every British monarch has formally surrendered these hereditary revenues at the start of their reign. Theoretically though, prince William could simply lay claim to them once more when his father dies.
In 1992, queen Elizabeth II was forced to sign a ‘memorandum of understanding’ with the government of John Major after a fire badly damaged Windsor Castle and there was a public outcry against the taxpayer footing the £60 million bill.4 The memorandum laid out that the queen and the state would split the cost - but also that the reigning monarch and their heir would “voluntarily” pay some unpublished amount of income tax on the profits from the duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall (the privy purse). In return they would continue not to be liable for the newly established inheritance tax.
Sovereign grant: the Sovereign Grant Act of 2011 abolished the old civil list system. Since April 2012, the government uses the profit from the crown estate to calculate the sovereign grant, which covers the cost for staff, official duties and travel expenses of the 11 ‘working’ members of the royal family, and about half of it is spent on the upkeep of occupied palaces. According to the ‘golden ratchet’ rule in the law, this grant can only ever go up, never down, even if the profits from the crown estate fall. The royal trustees (the prime minister, the chancellor and the king’s keeper of the privy purse - ie, treasurer) set and revise a percentage from the crown estate’s profit, in five-year intervals. In 2012-16, the rate was 15%, then it went temporarily up to 25% to pay for the repairs to Buckingham Palace and now stands at 20.5% for the years 2027‑32.
Privy purse: this includes the duchy of Lancaster - a portfolio of land, property and assets which is worth around £687 million and is separate from the crown estate. It is held in trust for the monarch and is used to “pay for his private and public expenditure” not covered by the sovereign grant. It made an “adjusted net surplus” of £25.2 million last year: ie, after Charles’ accountants had taken off every shred of expense they could think of. In other words, this is pure profit, on which Charles paid 45% tax - ie, £12.9 million. The rest goes into his own pocket.
Duchy of Cornwall: this is another massive portfolio worth an estimated £1.2 billion, which is used to pay for the private expenses of the heir to the throne. It made a surplus of £21.6 million last year and prince William paid tax of £7.76 million. The capital gains made by buying and selling property, and the rents received from tenants, can all accumulate and be reinvested tax-free - they are operating as mini-tax havens. To top it off, when a resident in either duchy dies without a traceable heir, their assets are transferred to the duchies.