If it's true that we are paying the PoW 1.5 million a year rent for Dartmoor prison...

[CurlewKate]

...among many other things, do you think that's OK? If so, why?

I'm not disuting that, but I would say it also means they aren't blamed for bad decisions... like Iraq war 2. Like us bombing syria...

Don't forget the air and the ground. Crown owns all oil gold coal in the UK.

For some reason taking rent from the RNLI seems to me particularly egregious. We had a RNLI collection box on the bar of our local pub when my children were little. Every time they put 10p in it to launch the little boat, the royal family got a cut....

@CurlewKate That is such egregiously bad logic. All charities use money to pay rents (which go to landlords and services (private companies). Every time you give to a charity your money is partially going to pay their running cost- so to other companies and their staff.

This is the same logic that people who hate teachers use to moan about paying their wages. Everything you spend money on is paying someone else. Trying to work out what percentage of how much went to things you dislike all the time would drive anyone mad.

I have a friend who has spent her career working in the third (charity) sector who says she’s always amazed by the number of people she meets who simply don’t understand that charities have all the normal running costs of any other business. The national insurances increases on employers will apply to any charity with employees now, for example, which is to say, most of them, which will mean they will need to raise more money to make up the difference, reduce employees, or just have less money to distribute.

But since it burns you so hard to have a monarchy let’s just fuck that all up and seek it off to the highest bidder so you can have the comfort of living in a republic. Those wonderful places without any government corruption and equality for all.

Can't we discuss the royal family like adults without people losing their rag like this?

I think that we're gaslit from birth about the RF. I have often wondered what they actually do for us, where's any leadership? What's the point of them?
Also, IIRC Cameron arranged a new deal that increases their annual allowance too - I think it's time for that to stop.
Perhaps they should be privatised.

Yes it would be interesting to see the terms of the lease to see whether there is get out clause.

I think the term end date was something like 2048 so it's unfair that rent should still be paid until then out of the public purse for an empty building.

@BustingBaoBun
I expect it's been recorded by many and will pop up on YouTube forever.

Everyone needs to know about this.

What they allowed those contractors to do to that lovely beach was shocking. I'm sure I saw nets over the holes as well to block the seabirds from nesting 😥.

Land Registration law needs amending so that all land requires compulsory registration including old leases.

The database should be available free of charge to anyone who wants to search the owner of a property.

I used to live in Dartmoor and have been on a tourist’s visit of the prison. It’s a cold, dank, overcrowded, miserable place. No wonder it was a high security prison.
Built by Napoleonic War prisoners to house themselves and work on the Prince Regent’s (so Prince of Wales AND King) forestry, marshland, quarry etc, it’s been a cash cow for 200 years. The village that serves it is called Princetown, no less. I’m glad such a place is now being decommissioned.

The real question is:
Are we going to blame Charles or William for personally earning millions of pounds from a structure that was set up precisely to profit from the prisoners’ unpaid hard labour? Acceptable at that time but slave labour in today’s world?
Cancel culture would say yes. I’m not sure.

It has a museum, but it's still very much a prison. Albeit an empty one right now, since they discovered how high the radon levels were last (?) year.

I imagine the large increase in rent on changing tenants from the police to ambulance services reflects the fact that rents have all gone up a lot in the past few years. @Serenster cited that rent charged must be at market level rather than peppercorn. Not watched the programme yet…

Noone "has to" charge market level. They choose to.

I've worked with landlords who have charged reduced or peppercorn levels to charities /NHS bodies etc.

In this, case they do and neither Charles nor William can do a thing. My post referred back to Serenester’s post of 2.41pm. This is mandated by parliament and managed by the Treasury, which controls all assets and takes all the profit, redistributing it in the form of the sovereign grant. If you do a see all, her posts are fascinating.

You are confusing the crown estate and the Duchy's.

So true. Children are trotted out for royal visits and have flags shoved in their hands and no critical thinking or questioning about the monarchy goes on at school. The BBC’s incredibly sycophantic news coverage is also to blame. The dissenting voices of Emperor’s new clothes are swiftly silenced.

Yes, take Camilla posturing about how much she cares about Domestic Violence , being reported on the BBC. Fine, so maybe find some refuges or something tangible.

And I can't see the BBC has even mentioned the dispatches report?

I can't understand why anyone thinks this is ok.

The Prison Service and NHS Trust involved have entered into contracts with a landowner. If those contracts are unreasonable (because of price or no break clauses or anything else) then the procurement team and management need to be held to account.

The closest I can get to the figures without doing a PhD is that 70% of land is owned by 1% of the population, 'largely' (no definition of 'largely' provided) determined by the way land was granted to a small band of supporting barons by William the Conqueror.

I think there is a huge issue in the way resources are unequally distributed in society, and it is only in the past century and a bit (Lloyd George's budget? 1910ish?) that a UK government first considered it something to be addressed. Then if course the 1945 Labour government that established the welfare state - which is now under significant attack.

The government has the power to change this, but it can only do that if it is supported by the electorate.

Blaming the RF for something entirely in the hands of the elected government (and something done by everyone else with that level of wealth) seems to be a bit blinkered.

If Major and then Cameron allowed an overly generous agreement with the RF, where is the anger at them - our elected representatives - who.let us down?

Until our elected representatives get to grips with this I struggle to blame the super wealthy for arranging their affairs to their own benefit, in compliance with the law.

My parents helped me get on the housing ladder, so I have benefited from - over a couple of decades - tens of thousands of unearned pounds, all done in compliance with tax law. We all hope to be able to help.our children and grandchildren - the government needs to put limits on what is socially beneficial, and what is perpetuating inequality.

Exactly. From birth we are taught that they are better than us, more important than us, that we must bow down to them and revere them, whilst being constantly reminded that no matter what we do, we will never be as good as them. And the best part of that is that we continually pay them to remain better than us. Our own national anthem is all about the king, and how we beg god to save our king etc. I am proud to be British but can’t we just even get a more relevant and meaningful national anthem that better represents this country and the people in it in 2024?

If the royal family wish to be seen as a pure hard nosed commercial landowner then fine.

They can start paying tax like anyone else.

They can stop living off government grant and expecting public money to fund their existence

They can stop expecting people to grovel and scrape in their presence

They can provide full transparency of accounts (like companies do)

And they can stop pretending to care about children with cancer/the homeless etc

And the BBC work extra hard on their coverage now to make sure you can’t see any sign of the protests with their huge yellow flags - they film tight so no one knows they’re there. So weird. The public mustn’t be allowed to see that not everyone fawns over these scroungers.

👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

And don’t get me started on the bloody portraits of Charles everywhere 🙄. Children should be taught to question this stuff from a young age - debate, challenge the status quo, not all be brainwashed with waving flags and drawing pictures of the king because we’re so excited to have him deign us with our presence for an hour.

It's awful isn't it and if it was any other landowner it would have been all over the news