It’s time to privatize the monarchy

It’s the deficit you see; we love the Queen but in these hardened economic times there really is no alternative. Okay, you weren’t going to believe that. Yes, we have wanted to do this for years, and now is our chance. There are other good conservative reasons why the royal family should be done away with anyway: meritocracy for one, not wanting scroungers living off benefits from earning so much more than someone on an average income for another.

Most importantly, the government is sitting on a gold mine of revenue and typically the government has managed to make a loss out of such a potentially profitable industry. Imagine if the royal family, well managed and in private ownership, could own the rights to all of the tea sets being manufactured in China with pictures of Kate and William on them. And why stop there? The Queen should start product placement – when football players are on the field they wear sponsorship, so why not pay the Queen to have a Dolce and Gabbana bag and drink Coca Cola? We could sell the rights for Diana: The Movie. Why not restart Big Brother in the Buckingham Palace? The possibilities are endless. In these economic times marketing the royal family could make billions.

Britain is a republic with a monarchy, or at least it seemed that way until recently. We are a nation of sceptical empiricists; we believe that laws of historical destiny have predictable and sad consequences. We believe that pre-historical social contracts are not worth the paper they are not written on. We seemed to believe that the royal family was a kind of ironic joke, a tourist attraction and a constitutional can of worms we would rather not open. Fundamentally we didn’t believe they were better than us – they are just flawed human beings like anyone else. When we read in Wikileaks about the contempt in which Prince Andrew was held by American diplomats for his absurd opinions, “Americans don’t know geography”, lack of intelligence and deluded sense of grandeur, we laughed. We laughed at Thomas Paine’s line about hereditary rulers making as much sense as hereditary mathematicians rang in our ears.

Then the tabloid press was up in arms about Charles and Camilla being mildly alarmed by student protesters while almost totally ignoring students who were in hospital with head injuries from police violence. And now The King’s Speech has come out, and according to The Economist we are all thinking about whether the Queen might come around for tea. Emigration is becoming a tempting alternative for the duration of the royal wedding; to watch fellow countrymen pathetically prostrate themselves before this absurd institution would just be too embarrassing and depressing.

I do have the right to ignore the institution. I am not a subject: if the Queen comes around my house for a cup of tea, I will not bow. I will stand fully on my own two feet before a fellow citizen of Britain and politely point her in the direction of the nearest Starbucks.