Sovereign Grant Bill

Thomas Docherty Excerpts

Thursday 14th July 2011 Commons Chamber

[Thomas Docherty (Dunfermline and West Fife) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend has demonstrated that he has a far superior knowledge of history than perhaps any other Member of the House who was not actually there during large sections of it. Does he agree that the histories of the United States and France are histories of violent revolution, whereas we have had a period of stable evolution, apart from a dark period in the 1650s and so on, largely because we have had a constitutional monarchy?

[Tristram Hunt]

I take my hon. Friend’s point, but we should not over-emphasise our Whiggish stability over the years. We often used to think of the 18th century as the age of equipoise and stability. In fact, underneath that monarchy, all sorts of revolutionary fervour was going on. The campaign of my hon. Friend the Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn) to have the Chartists properly recognised in the House hints at a slightly different history. It is a source of great sadness to many people that, although the House was rebuilt in the 1830s and ’40s, it took until mid-1890s for the statue of Cromwell to appear outside.

For all its narrow, Eurocentric and white family structure, the royal family also has a curious internationalist sensibility, for to understand the British royal family in the 19th and 20th centuries is to understand empire and the nature of Britain in the world. As we have heard today in respect of reforming the Act of Settlement, the monarch was also monarch of imperial nations across the world, then the British Commonwealth and then the Commonwealth. That points to the unique nature of Britain: its openness and sense of citizenship, which is, again, above and beyond blood and soil. Part of the strength of monarchy is that it speaks to the multicultural, multi-faith age in which we live. There is a curious modernity about the nature of monarchy, which, again, keeps its strength going.

The real virtue of the royal family today is the soft power embodied within it. We have heard, quite rightly, detailed discussions about £35 million or £37 million costs this afternoon, but the royal family as a brand vehicle for Britishness is worth huge sums more than £35 million or £37 million. The sums regained from the world’s media focus on London during the royal wedding recently were far in excess of its cost. Although our beloved former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, used to describe Britain as a young country, it is, in fact, a very old country.

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[Michael Ellis]

I am delighted to follow the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Tristram Hunt), who is clearly a royalist, and who is a founding member of the all-party parliamentary group on the Queen’s diamond jubilee, and I congratulate him on that.

It is easy to try to put a price on monarchy, as I think the hon. Gentleman was saying. Of course, to a certain extent, one has to do that, especially in such a debate as this, but the monarchy, personified so ably by our sovereign, is not bounded by monetary value; it is about honour, nobility of conduct, its historical nature, and an institution of which we can all be proud. If we look in some detail at the mischief that the Bill is trying to redress, the finances of the royal household, designed to support Her Majesty, are currently overly complex. There are no fewer than four grants, which are themselves hidebound and bureaucratic. They have a tendency to be inflexible in that if there is a depletion of one grant, there cannot be a transfer from the other grants to fill the gap. Consequently, the system clearly does not work. That, in and of itself, irrespective of one’s ideological views about monarchy as an institution, needs to be redressed.

However, it goes deeper than that, because the sums we are talking about—approximately £35 million—are, in governmental terms, de minimis. They are minuscule. I dare say that this area of expenditure is more scrutinised, deeply analysed and debated in various forums, including this House, than other areas of the public finances, where hundred of millions, or even billions, of pounds are spent, so there is no shortage of scrutiny whatsoever. It is clear that for the first time since the early 1970s Parliament is looking at a proper modernisation of the finances of the royal household and the monarchy.

[Thomas Docherty]

The hon. Gentleman refers to the level of scrutiny that the household finances receive, but this debate will last less than three hours. Does he not think that that is a flaw?

[Michael Ellis]

I think one can tell from the number of Members in the Chamber that the matter has been debated perfectly clearly.

The Crown Estate is the property of the sovereign and is in the right of the Crown. In the generations since George III’s accession in 1760, successive Governments have gone to the sovereign of the day and asked, “May we have the proceeds from the Crown Estate?” All sovereigns since, including George IV, William VI and so on, have signed away those rights. However, from a legal perspective, the fact that the application has been made and the request granted on each occasion perhaps indicates how the law would look at the matter. It seems clear to me that the revenue is surrendered to the Exchequer and that the legal implication of that act of surrender is that the revenue belongs to the Crown.

The sovereign grant is normally set as equal to 15% of the profit from the Crown Estate, as has already been alluded to. It could be argued that that is sufficient, but it is not over-generous, and no one could reasonably argue that it is disproportionate to the affairs of the Crown. If one takes the care to look at where Crown expenditure actually goes, one will see that much of it goes back to general public usage. For example, most of the communications allowance is spent on writing paper, stationery and clerical costs for responding to items of correspondence received by the royal household. With regard to entertainment costs, tens of thousands of British subjects receive hospitality at garden parties, for example, so costs are incurred in that way.

The royal palaces account for a huge part of royal expenditure. If we did not have a royal family, it is reasonably safe to assume that we would retain the palaces—one would hope that they would not be knocked down to build car parks—and consequently there would be museums that would need to be maintained, although no doubt few people would visit them. The roofs would still need to be fixed and leaks repaired, so the Exchequer would not save. When one takes the care to look at the expenditure, one will see that it is extremely modest and, as has been alluded to, extremely impressive savings have been made over the past couple of years.

The current system is inflexible, overly bureaucratic and has not been as transparent as it could have been. One cannot rationalise romance, and I take the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) and others that the institution of the monarchy is about more than just money, but one must bear in mind that although the monarchy is an emotionally unifying institution and, in my view, crucial to the success of this state, it is also susceptible to proper analysis of its finances, which is what the Bill will do. Consequently, I give it my full support.

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[Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr (Jonathan Edwards). I agree with every single word of his speech.

These are delightful occasions. I am sorry that the hon. Member for the middle ages and North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) has left us, because he gave us another cameo performance today, although he did not give the same peroration. He would have been very much at home in the court of King Canute.

A couple of days ago, the hon. Member for Northampton North (Michael Ellis) rather optimistically sent me a letter—addressed to me by my first name, although I do not really know him in any way—requesting a contribution for the new stained glass window. I am afraid that I had to send him a rather disappointing reply. He did persuade me to put down an early-day motion drawing attention to the fact that we are already fairly well supplied with statues, pictures and paintings of royalty in this place, but very badly off in those things for a range of people, such as the Tolpuddle martyrs, the Chartists and the suffragettes, who have contributed hugely to the strength of our democracy and transformed this country into the proud modern democracy that it is now.

Whenever royalty is discussed, the House becomes infantilised. It is worth mentioning again that because of our own decisions, which go back seven centuries, we are not allowed to criticise not only the monarch, but any member of her family. When an attempt was made to have a debate on the conduct of Prince Andrew on two occasions, I and other Members were gagged in saying anything about him that was not emetic, sycophantic drivel. We must understand that in this debate and many others, we are denied the opportunity as a free Parliament to discuss the personalities and behaviour of the entire royal family—not that I want to be critical tonight.

I tried to make a point in the earlier debate about the special need for the role of the Head of State. The point of the story that I told about Mrs Thatcher is that we need someone who is above politics to act when a Prime Minister gets out of control. There was a possibility in 1990 that Margaret Thatcher could have caused a general election and that Parliament, the Cabinet and the Conservative party would not have been able to stop her. However, the Queen could have stopped her and almost certainly would have done so given the Queen’s personality and status. It is questionable whether other Prime Ministers would have had that strength of character and whether possible other monarchs would have had that strength of character. I am thinking of the Queen’s uncle and the Queen’s successor, who suffers from an incontinence of interference in matters that are way outside what a monarch should be involved in.

[Thomas Docherty]

On a point of order, Mr Deputy Speaker. Could you remind me whether it is appropriate for an hon. Member to make remarks that appear to be disparaging about a member of the royal household?

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Nigel Evans)]

I have already had to remind Mr Flynn that when he is referring to the royal family, he should do so with dignity, as their status in this country behoves. I hope that he will refrain from disparaging remarks in the future.

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[Thomas Docherty (Dunfermline and West Fife) (Lab)]

I am not sure whether I have more trepidation when I follow the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) or when I follow my hon. Friend the Member for Bolsover (Mr Skinner). It is slightly ironic that we are having this debate in one of the royal palaces, and perhaps we should recognise the contribution that the royal household makes to the upkeep of some of the rather expensive parts of this building. It is probably worth reflecting on some of the more turbulent debates that the House has had with the royal family about their financing over the centuries—