Author, historian and accountant Norman Baker has been whacking the Windsors for decades. Baker is one of the few clear-eyed critics of the Windsors and their finances, and he’s been tracking royal finances for so many years. Previously, he was considered a crank who dangerously tried to expose a popular monarch’s private finances. But times change, the popular queen is dead, and now Britain is left with an unpopular king, unpopular consort and an illiterate heir to the throne. Baker has written a lengthy piece in the Times of London about the true cost of the Windsors – as in, how much British taxpayers are really paying to keep a decreasing number of family members ensconced in palaces and castles, even as they make zero effort to genuinely modernize. You can read the full piece here, and here are some highlights:
The Sovereign Grant replacing the civil list: The civil list provided £7.9 million in support in its last year, 2011, plus a sum to cover transport costs. In 2025, the sovereign grant that replaced it will generate £132.1 million for the royals. That is a compound annual growth rate of 22.29 per cent. Even if you add in all the extra costs in transport or otherwise that were met outside the civil list in 2011, that still generates an annual compound growth rate of more than 10 per cent. A bankrupt royal family of 1760 has become fantastically wealthy, with King Charles alone having reportedly amassed a fortune worth at least £1.8 billion.
Reforming the monarchy: There is a legitimate argument for a monarchy, just as there is for a republic. What there can be no argument for is the unreformed imperial monarchy we uniquely still have, and its enormous and ever increasing cost to British taxpayers.
A slimmed-down monarchy. If we now have 11 working royals, that is indeed a noticeable reduction compared with, say, ten years earlier. However, that has been achieved more through the effects of external circumstances than by design. The Queen and Prince Philip have died, Harry and Meghan have excused themselves and Andrew has had to be cast into outer darkness. Yet the cost to the public of the monarchy has not reduced in line with this decrease. On the contrary, despite having fewer working royals, the bill for the taxpayer has ballooned, along with the wealth of the royals.
Officially, the Windsors cost the taxpayers £132.1 million a year: The reality is that there appear to be far more hidden costs relating to the British monarchy than to any other. That £132.1 million is merely the tip of a very large royal iceberg. Many of these hidden costs to the taxpayer relate to the controversial treatment of the Duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster, and other unique wheezes such as the exemption from inheritance tax on private property handed down from monarch to monarch, and the bloated bill for security, which is thought to cost between £150 million and £200 million annually. The anti-monarchy group Republic produced a detailed report in 2024 and estimated that, all things considered, the annual cost to the public purse of supporting the royals was now in excess of £500 million each year.
Other European monarchies pledge support to democratically elected legislatures: In Britain there is no such subservience to democratic values. Being head of the Church of England, the only oath Charles took was to God. In that capacity, at the accession council that immediately follows the previous monarch’s death he read out a lurid passage condemning Catholics, also unchanged over centuries. Neither at the accession council nor at the subsequent coronation is there any mention of democracy, let alone any idea that the new monarch will pledge to serve the people of the country.
This is, I believe, evidence of the heightened panic over the incoming Scooter King’s reign. We know that William plans to “modernize” and “change the monarchy” so that he isn’t expected to work before 10 am or after 4 pm. We’ve been told that priority #1 for William is stripping titles, because he only wants to be king to punish his brother and sister-in-law. But there are growing concerns that William’s idea of modernization really is that superficial and lazy – taking away titles, refusing to work, refusing to live in Buckingham Palace. And they’ll all be stuck with an unwieldy, unmodern monarchy which costs half a billion a year for upkeep on William, Kate and their children and that’s about it.
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