Should the Queen donate some of her fortune to the NHS?

[Iateallthecookies000]

Her message of support was great but should she follow that with a financial donation?

The Queen is in a league of her own - she owns a sixth of the surface of the Earth, but as has been said, she's hardly able to liquidate a lot of it any time soon. I still don't think she's particularly hard up with available funds, though. If anything, her influence is more powerful than her vast wealth. Considering that her people 'make it known' to Daimler that HM 'would be interested in considering' one of their vehicles and then a top-of-the-range one is delivered the next morning, on the house, I do wonder if the things that 'she'd be interested in considering' couldn't be upscaled somewhat - water, sanitation, basic shelter for those who have none etc.

As for other supremely rich people who don't have the trappings of state or position and who simply have billions of pounds or dollars at their disposal, I simply cannot get my head around why most of them wouldn't want to help. £100m is surely more than anybody could possibly spend in the most opulent lifetime, so why would you want to keep £10bn, when you could do massive good worldwide for £5bn and still be left with far more than you could ever possibly spend? After a certain stage, it ceases to be money - i.e. a tool with which to buy things - and just becomes an ever-increasing number.

We're not on a water meter, so we could take thousands of gallons a day for no extra cost - but we wouldn't do that, because we simply don't need it and cannot use it anyway. Why would we leave a hose on at full power 24/7 poked down a drain "because it's ours by right and we've paid for it" when we can just take as much as we want to use, never remotely coming anywhere near going short, and then leave the rest for others to use, who do need/want it. It's the same principle really.

Absolutely!

Apparently jk Rowling has more money than the Queen ask her for some money

A few years ago, I received a charity begging letter appeal from an organisation helping very vulnerable women, IIRC. An extremely worthy charity, of course, but what drew my eye was the fact they said how much they needed to raise to operate for a month - I think it was about £55K (a relatively small charity run by volunteers). However, according to their letterhead, their patron was JK Rowling, for whom £55K would be back-of-sofa loose change.

I'm just a nobody, albeit fortunate enough to live in the UK, but if a charity I believed in enough to endorse asked for my help to launch a mass marketing campaign in Somalia or Sierra Leone in the hope of achieving a total of £5 a month in donations from ordinary folk there, I'd just chuck them the fiver and save them all the bother. Just why wouldn't you?

There are many people far wealthier than the queen, and the majority of them inherited it. I'd like to see all of the top 5% give money to health services and those struggling. It's too late to help out immediately, but funding research for vaccines, providing food for the millions who can't afford it etc should be expected of anyone who's a billionaire.

If our economy had been more equitable there would have been more money in the NHS so it was better prepared. More families could have afforded food and had some stocks in reserve. Interested didn't create the chorus, but it makes the impact of it so much worse. The rich would benefit from a stronger NHS and finding a vaccine just as much as the poor. It's in their own best interests to support essential services.