Although I only saw about 15 minutes of it (was on at work), and the cost was steep for a wedding but cheap for a royal wedding (~20million GBP, that includes the cost to hire the Police and all of the other shit that went on. It works out at ~32pence per person), it was a small investment for massive returns, in the form of tourists and tourist tat.
The wedding has raked in billions for the UK economy. Even up here in Yorkshire it meant that it was a good Friday in the shop (historically the worst day of the week), just because the main owner insisted on tarting up the windows and having a TV to draw in the crowds celebrating.
Did you see how much Harry was flirting with her? They are so going to be knocking boots tonight.
I don't fully subscribe to this idea that it automatically brings in money to the country. It's the same argument countries use to convince tax payers the Olympics is a worthwhile investment. According to the International Centre for Olympic Studies at the University of Western Ontario no Olympics has actually ever turned a profit. Go figure.
Empty roads means no one is filling their fuel tanks and no one is going to the shops and no one is building and selling stuff. Then there is the opportunity cost. No one know how that £25m would have been otherwise invested by those who actually went out, worked, and earned it. Some shops and pubs benefited but that's not the full picture. That £25m is on top of all the other money spent maintaining the Royals. The figure to provide the social environment for that wedding to take place and be 'popular' is much higher. Probably in the hundreds of millions and above.
To make a statement like it 'brings in money for the country' is naive (tho it's the kinda thing u here time and time again on UK news channels going un-challenged), and without real, proper, independent, and thorough analysis a statement like that is without foundations.
The idea that '32p' is no money at all is the same argument every institution uses to justify it's existence. What is funny is that despite being diametrically opposed those in the arts and the left of politics use exactly the same arguments as those on the right who support the Royals.
In the end it all adds up to a hefty amount. An amount that sees even those on a lowest of wages saying goodbye to a good 40-50% of their wealth. While it still remains that the Royal Family may 'turn a profit for UK PLC' as they themselves are land owners etc..., considering we're heading into some very very very very tough times I can't see how everyone is benefiting from this extra 'investment' for the Royals.
The wedding itself was the most bizarre thing I've ever witnessed in my life. I can't quite calculate how the Royal's can actually take themselves seriously. Riding around on million pound horse driven carts in the centre of London... just odd. At lest the kid in the middle of the pic gets the craziness of the situation- http://www.mtv.co.uk/files/ima ... lcony_3_wenn3315952.jpg?1
I'd never say it automatically brings in money, but hotels have massively benifitied, as have vendors of tourist tat. Those tacky flags don't make themselves either which means jobs were created (okay, the vast majority were in China).
You don't need to fill your fuel tank to spend money, vast amounts of people held parties, that required going out and buying booze, snacks, decorations, it all shovels money into the economy, money that wouldn't get spent if it wasn't for the wedding.
But try not to forget that due to the Civil List the massive amounts of money the royal portfolio makes gets given to the Gov't and in return they are given a fraction of its worth, in the old days when it was created the royal portfolio was hardly breaking even, so it actually cost us money, now they could easily say "**** y'all, we'll keep our cash" and due to Royal status they are tax exempt, it'd actually work out to be a loss to us.
Just like the Olympics it could easily just cost money, if the amount of people who didn't care about the royals was greater it would've been a less flamboyant affair, but as it is The Royals (especially those in line for the throne) are a massive tourist attraction.
It is costing us more in tax to support various nothing jobs, schemes and money loss adventures. It'd be nice to see that 20m added to the pot hole repair fund, because the roads round here look as though they've been ploughed, but I'd much rather see the 20m be taken out of a stupid project like the yacht the Hull council brought and runs with the idea that by letting youths who spend their time mugging old ladies have a play, some how they will stop mugging old ladies. So far it has had a 0% success rate, but rather than realising this and canning the project, there are talks of buying another yacht.
That is a waste of money because it puts nothing back into the pot.
I won't disagree with you, but lets be honest, a huge amount of women only dream about such a wedding. If they had the opportunity to have even half of that wedding they'd leap at it. The females who came into the shop to watch spent the whole time oooing and arrring over everything. The ages ranged from around 8 through to 80.
While the censorship imposed on the ABC over what is allowed to be broadcast is an issue in Aus, rather than NZ, the whole issue sum's up the majority view down here.
What a pack of complete tossers, the NZ view is that the sooner we become a republic and get rid of the scum the better !
Prince Charles is strange and his father so insensitive and prejudiced that he could be a breakfast TV host, says New Zealand's former deputy prime minister.
Michael Cullen's comments, contained in notes for a speech he will make in Wellington this week, are bound to outrage supporters of the monarchy.
As a senior Cabinet minister, Cullen described himself as the Labour Government's "token monarchist" and fought against any move for New Zealand to become a republic.
But, in a major about-turn at a constitution conference on Friday, he will publicly lay out a road map to becoming a republic when the Queen dies. http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/n ... d=1&objectid=10669598
Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd has told the BBC to "lighten up" over the Chaser's thwarted plan to commentate the royal wedding.
Mr Rudd also said the British national broadcaster, which was providing the ABC with the clean feed the Chaser team planned to use, needed to develop "an Australian sense of humour".
"If you want my personal view - this is not the government view - but my personal view is I really think the BBC needs to lighten up a bit and just get a bit of a sense of humour," he told the Sunrise program this morning.
Prince Philip serves as a telling link between the modern day royal family and it’s despicable history. He has made so many racist remarks in public, that they literally fill an entire book.
In 1984 he asked a Kenyan woman “You are a woman, aren’t you?”.
In 1986 he told British students in China ”If you stay here much longer, you will go home with slitty eyes.”
In 1998, during a tour of Papua New Guinea, he told another British student, ”You managed not to get eaten then?”
While on a tour of a company near Edinburgh, Scotland, he saw a poorly wired fuse box. “It looks as though it was put in by an Indian,” he remarked.
During a small town visit in Scotland, in a brief conversation with a driving instructor, he asked, “How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to get them through the (road) test?”
In a 2002 visit to Australia, Prince Philip asked an Aborigine, “Still throwing spears?”
Also, he once told a group of deaf children standing near a Jamaican steel drum musician, “Deaf? If you are near there, no wonder you are deaf.”
The list goes on and on. While the media often laugh the remarks off as “gaffes”, they take on a more serious nature when Philip’s background and the organizations he is involved with are more carefully examined.
It is well documentedthat Prince Philip’s sister, Sophia, was married to Christopher of Hesse-Cassel, an SS colonel who named his eldest son Karl Adolf in Hitler’s honour. Indeed, all four of Philip’s sisters married high-ranking Nazis. The prospect of the former Nazis and Nazi sympathisers attending his 1947 wedding to the future Queen of England meant he was allowed to invite only two guests.
Two years ago, more revelations of Philip’s Nazi links emerged in a book that featured never before published photographs of Philip aged 16 at the 1937 funeral of his elder sister Cecile, flanked by relatives in SS and Brownshirt uniforms.
Another picture shows his youngest sister, Sophia, sitting opposite Hitler at the wedding of Hermann and Emmy Goering. Philip was forced to concede that his family found Hitler’s attempts to restore Germany’s power and prestige ‘attractive’ and admitted they had ‘inhibitions about the Jews’. http://www.prisonplanet.com/mo ... s-and-neo-feudalists.html
Your response is just as predictable if not more. I could set my clock to you replying one of my posts with exactly the same statement you make every single time.
You might wanna buck the trend and add something of interest next time