I go to quite a lot of castles, monasteries and things like that. I went to the Vatican even though the pope doesn't live in the actual place anymore (he's got that apartment just to the side of the St Peter's Square). There was an awesome castle in Bodrum with an underwater archaeology museum in it. All good stuff. But I can't see that if we abolished royalty, that they'd bugger off to another country, and be allowed to take things like the crown jewels with them. The crown jewels are British and would stay in the tower of London.
Obviously, as with most of the Royal assets, the government own them and loan them back to the Royal family, including things like, The Crown Jewels, Windsor, Buck palace, the crown estate. The point being is that Worldwide the Royal family are hugely popular and tourists come to London in part because of the Royal Family. Look at the royal wedding, watched in 180 countries and conservatively estimated to have raised £500M at the time and around £2bn overall. 4m extra visitors at the time came to London. As stated, I couldn't give a flying **** about them, but let's be clear, many could.
You could say that worldwide jack the ripper is hugely popular and draws tourism from around the world. Dorsnt mean it would have been a good idea to house him in one of the most expensive places in the uk and give him a massive chink of public money.
Chop off their heads and stick them on stakes on Tower Bridge, that would bring the tourists along to gawk
Kick Liz the sponger out of Buck House and the Tourists would have more to look at, then you could charge a higher entry fee
The government doesn't own the crown estate But otherwise I agree with all of that The royals are an asset that we can take advantage of as a country.
It's better than what we had for the previous set up where we had no football at all at the weekend. At least now there is football to watch Thrusday-Tuesday, so it gives us a chnace to see what else is going on with the home nations, and also take in the top clash - Russia v Sweden was a greate game. Personally I enjoy watching Scotchland's campaigns - no national team is able to build up hopes and expectation only to come crashing down with a herioc death as the Scots. Whatsmore, it has been too long since the Tartan ARmy graced a tournament. I would love to see Scotland have a revival like that of Wales. As for ENgland, we rarely play with verve and excitement, often we're too robotic and stymied in our play. I can't remenber that last great performance we put in. Even in 1990 we were functional and fortunate rather than true world beaters, and as is customary went out to the first good team we came up against. Our group matches against Ireland and Holland were dull draws, and teh winn over Egypt was forgettable. I think watching England is now akin to those distopian movies of a downtrodden people waiting for a messiah, to add the flair, sparkle and class that would lift the players around him. I genuinely believe we just need that one superstar player.
1996 Euro's vs Holland was our last truly great performance on a big stage, maybe you could also include the 5-1 away to Germany but that was a qualifier.