The deepening cost-of-living crisis has pushed up bills in the UK, with households now spending 12% more on essentials than they were a year ago, Nationwide reports.
According to the monthly analysis by Britain’s biggest building society, spending on utility bills jumped by around a third (34%) last month in annual terms.
Spending on mortgage payments surged by 17%, while rent payments were up by 11%. The report also showed that spending on loans and insurance rose by 8% and 7%, respectively.
The study found that in the past six months, nearly two-fifths (38%) had used credit cards to cover essential items such as food, drink, public transport and childcare.
“Our research shows that while the number of people worried about their finances has fallen slightly, there are people relying on credit as a way of bridging the gap for essential bills,” said Mark Nalder, the payments strategy and performance director at Nationwide.
Significant growth has been also reported in most of the non-essential spending categories, with the amount spent on holiday and airline travel soaring 19% and 34%, respectively, from a year ago.
Nalder noted that despite rising costs, households are “clearly looking to strike the balance between being fiscally responsible and still being able to spend money on themselves.”
Nationwide analyzed 208 million debit and credit cards, as well as direct debit transactions made by its members.
“It has also been brought to my attention by a whistleblower from a very reliable source that one of these institutions is covering up clear data that reveals that the mRNA vaccine increases inflammation of the heart arteries,” he said. “They are covering this up in fear that they may lose funding from the pharmaceutical industry.”
This article may contain statements that reflect the opinion of the author
British Member of Parliament Andrew Bridgen has called for an “immediate and complete suspension” of the mRNA Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccines, alleging that a senior health official is covering up a report showing how these vaccines increase inflammation of the heart arteries.
The conservative government of the U.K. recently approved giving children from six months old to four years old a low dose of Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine. Bridgen called on Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to overturn this decision, claiming that the mRNA vaccines are dangerous not just for children but also for pregnant and breastfeeding women.
Bridgen called the mRNA vaccines “not safe, not effective and not necessary,” pointing out that the British government has received “almost half a million reports of adverse effects from the public” since the Pfizer vaccines were first distributed in the United Kingdom.
The MP also questioned how effective the mRNA vaccines truly are, noting that real-world data during the post-vaccine omicron variant wave shows that “we would need to vaccinate 7,300 people over the age of 80 to prevent one death.”
Bridgen: Leading British cardiologist covered up adverse effect data on mRNA vaccines
According to Bridgen, a leading member of the British Heart Foundation deliberately suppressed a report providing strong evidence that the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines can cause heart damage.
“It has also been brought to my attention by a whistleblower from a very reliable source that one of these institutions is covering up clear data that reveals that the mRNA vaccine increases inflammation of the heart arteries,” he said. “They are covering this up in fear that they may lose funding from the pharmaceutical industry.”
Without providing a specific name, Bridgen claimed that this person has a “prominent leadership role” in the heart foundation and is “the leader” of a cardiology research department. Furthermore, he noted that this person forced his research team to sign non-disclosure agreements “to ensure that this important data never sees the light of day.”
“This man is an absolute disgrace,” said Bridgen. “Systemic failure in an over-medicated population also contributes to a huge waste of British taxpayers’ money.”
In response to Bridgen’s statement, many have called for him to apologize. Shadow Health Minister Andrew Gwynne of the Labor Party said Bridgen is spreading “anti-vaccine misinformation,” and that he should not be allowed to use his platform as an elected official “to spread these kinds of baseless conspiracy theories.”
“Vaccine hesitancy costs lives. COVID vaccines are safe and effective and politicians should be doing everything they can to encourage uptake,” he said. “Mr. Bridgen needs to apologize and correct the record, and Rishi Sunak should get a grip on the conspiracy theorists in the Conservative Party.”
Learn more about the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines at Vaccines.news.
An academic study by @JasonHickel estimates British colonialism caused 165 million deaths in India from 1880-1920, while stealing trillions of dollars of wealth
The global capitalist system was founded on European imperial genocides, which inspired Hitlerhttps://t.co/2R5cdMGU0L
There is no good reason to allow the evil empire to retain any legitimacy as the British royal family papers over the pillage it continues to benefit from.
The death of Queen Elizabeth II, the longest-serving monarch of British royalty, has sparked global fascination and spawned thousands of clickbait reports of the details of her funeral. Americans, who centuries ago rejected monarchy, are seemingly obsessed with the ritualism, bizarrely mourning the demise of an elderly and fabulously wealthy woman who was born into privilege and who died of natural causes at the ripe old age of 96 across the ocean.
Perhaps this is because popular and long-running TV shows about British royalty like “The Crown” have convinced us that we know intimate details about the royals—and worse, they cause us to believe we should care about a family that is a symbolic marker of past imperial grandeur.
But for those who are descended from the subjects of British imperialist conquest, the queen, her ancestors, and her descendants represent the ultimate evil empire.
India, my home country, celebrated its 75th anniversary of independence from British rule this year. Both my parents were born before independence, into a nation still ruled by the British. I heard many tales while growing up of my grandfather’s absences from home as he went “underground,” wanted for seditious activity against the British. After independence in 1947, he was honored for being a “freedom fighter” against the monarchy.
Despite the popularity and critical acclaim of “The Crown” and movies and shows like it, I found a far stronger connection to the new superhero series “Ms. Marvel,” if for no other reason than the fact that it tackles the horrors of partition, a little-known (in the U.S.) legacy of the evil empire.
As Pakistani writer Minna Jaffery-Lindemulder explains in New Lines, “The British changed the borders of India and Pakistan at the eleventh hour in 1947 before declaring both nations independent, leaving the former subjects of the crown confused about where they needed to migrate to ensure their safety.” As a result, 15 million people felt forced to move from one part of the South Asian subcontinent to another, a mass cross-exodus with an estimated death toll ranging from half a million to 2 million.
Today, those contested borders, callously and recklessly drawn in 1947 by British officials acting at the behest of the crown, remain a source of simmering tensions between India and Pakistan that occasionally erupt into full-blown wars.
This is the legacy of British monarchy. The United Kingdom enjoys a hideous distinction in the Guinness Book of World Records, for “most countries [62] to have gained independence from the same country.”
One could argue that Elizabeth, who was gifted the throne and its title in 1952, did not lead an aggressive empire of conquest and instead presided over an institution that, under her rule, became largely symbolic and ceremonial in nature. And indeed, many do just that, referring to her, for example, as an “exemplar of moral decency.”
Rahul Mahajan, author of Full Spectrum Dominance and The New Crusade, has a different opinion, referring in an interview to Elizabeth as a “morally unremarkable person with a job that involved doing extremely unremarkable things.”
Mahajan explains further, saying that this was “a highly privileged person, given an opportunity to influence world events in some degree, which she had to do nothing to earn, who never did anything particularly remarkable, innovative, or insightful.”
…the Royal family is the galvanising force of colonialism. The concept of empire sits in existence next to cancer, insofar as they are both forces for malignant growth. Bursts of enthusiasm for them are like cheering on your murderer.
The British Monarchy is one of the world’s more malignant forces and we are thoroughly entitled to say so. Quite contrary to its micromanaged image of a kindly benefactor, serving the best interests of the people, it is the apotheosis of rot, corruption, and evil, an outdated institution harking back to the middle ages, steeped deep in scandal, nepotism, toxic entitlement. Accountability is absent. Its preening pageantry is bombastic yet dull. It is a bastion of elitism and intolerance, yet, despite being evidently malignant, criticising it is frowned upon.
You haven’t seen reactionary patriotism until you’ve seen a nation mourning a deceased queen. And I am standing in the middle of it, feeling somewhat confused and perplexed by endless pronouncements on the Queen’s honor and integrity, knawing at my ears. It has knawed right through to the brain of some people, their central nervous system hijacked and programmed to feel in some way indebted to a woman who sat on a throne funded by taxpayers, the people autonomically performing heart-rending tributes.
Properly adhering to the rules of democracy, monarchies are illegitimate and basically illegal. Indeed, illegality is a running theme with the British royals, some characterised by their rancid crimes, such as Prince Andrew, clinging to his privilege to evade punishment for paedophilia and networking with sex traffickers. Despite the royals embodying scandal of this enormity, there are, nonetheless, very few avenues left for criticising them.
Contractually obliged by virtue of their status as leaders of the institution of the British Empire, the Royal family is the galvanising force of colonialism. The concept of empire sits in existence next to cancer, insofar as they are both forces for malignant growth. Bursts of enthusiasm for them are like cheering on your murderer. Down in their dirty secrets, past their disgraceful treatment of Diana, the Royal family were in cahoots with serial child abuser and rapist Jimmy Saville, who was so far in with the royals they used him as a mediator with Diana, who naturally loathed him.
In conclusion, the British monarchy is hell’s answer to how to govern a country.
…We can talk about the oil rags of this tyranny, we must never forget the engineers because like I say, these people even Schwab and Gates, higher up the hierarchy as they may be, are still gofers for a force, a network that spans the world and works through apparently individual governments to the same, sinister satanic end and places like this is where they operate from
It is to understand as we scan nearly 8 billion people being manipulated and imposed upon by a tiny few. We need to understand where the real power is and it’s not with satanic forces that operate out of places like the City of London. Our perception that they have power is a misunderstanding of where the power is. Their power, the power of the few is simply the acquiescence to their diktats by the many.
It’s always been us! It’s always been us throughout known human history who have handed our power to the few which is why throughout human history the few have always controlled the many.
David Icke Speech in London 17th September – Transcribed by Christopher Briscoe
“Well, well, bloody well! How appropriate! How apt that we should stand here today next to the Bank of England (cheers) in one of the global bellies of the beast – The City of London financial district – the square mile!
And how, how apt to, that we gather here today in this belly of the beast. While in other parts of this City millions come together to pay homage and exalt a very symbol of their oppression and enslavement – and that’s what I want to emphasize today where all this is actually coming from.
Where Covid came from, the jab came from, human-caused global warming nonsense has come from, the Ukraine narrative, and now the eulogization by so many millions of a Royal family that is the head of state only because of who had sex with who within one family. It is nonsensical – it is an expression of the very hierarchy, so run from places like this that has held humanity in servitude for known human history.
Of course, the demonic faces on these banners must face justice for their mega crimes against humanity, (cheers) and we must not rest until they do so. Hancock, Witty, and all of them! Yes ‘Midazolam Matt Hancock’ (boos) is still at large, a man who oversaw the mass murder of the elderly in the spring of 2020 with an end-of-life drug called Midazolam, who then called it the first wave of covid when it was the first wave of democide. Murder, mass murder by the state!
Hancock, Witty, Vallance, Javid, Johnson, Fatab(?) Yes they must face the consequences for their actions, but it goes much bigger than them – they are not the architects of mass murder and mass control, they are the gophers, the agents, the accomplices of something much greater that hides in the shadows in places like this – the square mile run by secret societies of pure bloody evil!
And I say this to the police forces of these lands – It is to your, to your shame in extremis that you have stood by and continue to stand by while your fellow humans are murdered, and not only that, not only that, you then protect, and keep from justice the very people who are doing the murdering while at the same time, you abuse, seek to silence and marginalize those with the moral courage and the awareness to challenge the murder and expose the murder! You, you in uniform are not there primarily to protect the people – that is a myth! You are there to protect those from whom the people need protecting! (yeah!) Moral courage! Where is your self-respect, where is your awareness of what you do?
But, we can talk about the oil rags of this tyranny, we must never forget the engineers because like I say, these people even Schwab and Gates, higher up the hierarchy as they may be, are still gofers for a force, a network that spans the world and works through apparently individual governments to the same, sinister satanic end and places like this is where they operate from. The plan is this which is why, we must, yes, focus on the gofers and the oil rags for their part in this, but we must not lose sight of where it is coming from because the plan is to create the unfolding catastrophe for humanity that’s happening all over the world, and this winter we’ve seen nothing yet with the energy prices where people of fixed incomes and no incomes will have to choose between food and warmth.
I wonder if Charlie boy will be doing that!? (laughter) So the idea, as it’s started with lockdown and continues now with the destruction of the economy through the massive increases in energy and fuel.
The idea is for people in individual countries, quote, to blame their governments and cult gofers in government for everything because the idea then is having dismantled our lives and our ability to put food on the table and warmth in our homes, that the other level of the cult, via its corporations, its banks, yes, and its politicians, er, political people who are controlled by them to come forward and say, look at the mess that governments have made of your lives. But we are now going to step forward, we the corporations, the banks, the billionaires of the cult, to save you from what your governments have imposed upon you when those same people from the background have been orchestrating the catastrophe via those governments and gofers in government.
It is a mind trick that they are seeking to play – it’s in their bloody documents. And we mustn’t buy it. We must see the gofer’s responsibility, but we must also see where it is coming from and, so yes they must face the consequences, but we must understand the game that is playing us and cease to take part.
And there’s another mind trick that we must always be aware of, and that is that we are manipulated in our anger in our fury at what is being done to become what we oppose. What we fight we become! The world over, the history over, you see the evidence constantly of people challenging tyranny and then becoming the architects of tyranny by succumbing to the same mentality and the same methodology of those they oppose.
We have to go in another direction – you do not eliminate the low ground by fighting on it. You eliminate the low ground by ceasing to cooperate with it. By building something better and refusing to cooperate with anything else, because the most powerful word in the English language, or any other language, is and has always been, it is the word that has ended every tyranny in history and ultimately it will end this one.
And that word, of course, is: “No! No! No!”
It is to understand as we scan nearly 8 billion people being manipulated and imposed upon by a tiny few. We need to understand where the real power is and it’s not with satanic forces that operate out of places like the City of London. Our perception that they have power is a misunderstanding of where the power is. Their power, the power of the few is simply the acquiescence to their diktats by the many.
How can 8 billion people be controlled by a handful unless those 8 billion, or most of them, give their power to the handful? This has to end and when it ends this tyranny will end! (cheers)
People say what’s the solution?!!!. (said forcefully) Get yourself a calculator, put in 8 billion, take away the number in full knowledge of who is imposing this and there’s your bloody solution!
And what it takes, what it takes is just that stiffened backbone that courage to stand up to what is a house of cards if only we would stop holding it together.
Let’s look our children and grandchildren in the eye and tell them that we are too frightened to stand up to this tyranny, tell them that we can’t be bothered to research what’s actually going on and instead sit there getting our perception from the BBC and the Daily bloody Mail. (boos)!
This is the time for humanity to take responsibility for its world to stop pointing the finger and saying ‘it’s them’. No! It’s us! It’s always been us! It’s always been us throughout known human history who have handed our power to the few which is why throughout human history the few have always controlled the many.
Enough! No More!
The mantra of the people, as others gather in their millions to worship their oppression let the mantra of the awake people, those that can see and their number is growing all the time be: ‘No No No!”
We will no longer acquiesce and cooperate with our own enslavement because when we stop doing so, we cannot be enslaved!
This is the time to change human history by changing the public population response that has created human history.
8 billion – Wake up! Wake up! And when we do, this tyranny not only will be over, it will be impossible for it to maintain its power because its power is our power. We give it to them. It’s time, my God it’s long past the time to take it back! Thank you very much!”
The establishment wants you to drink up the fantasy the Monarchy embodies the “best of Britain”. It’s the opposite. It’s the enduring embodiment of the worst of Britain: inherited wealth + privilege, a rigid class system, structural racism, imperialism, and unaccountable power.
Sex abuse victims say the Duke of York should have mourned his mother’s death in private
Another way of saying he is guilty: “Andrew was stripped of his royal patronages and honorary military titles earlier this year after he settled a civil lawsuit with Virginia Giuffre, who accused him of sexually assaulting her while she was still a minor in 2001.”
Lawyers who represented victims of deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein told The Independent that their clients are angry and upset after seeing Prince Andrew return to public life following the death of his mother, Queen Elizabeth II.
The British royal, who has also been accused of abuse, was an associate of Epstein.
Andrew was stripped of his royal patronages and honorary military titles earlier this year after he settled a civil lawsuit with Virginia Giuffre, who accused him of sexually assaulting her while she was still a minor in 2001. Andrew refrained from public appearances after the settlement, but the disgraced royal has returned to the spotlight following the death of his mother, walking in the Queen’s funeral procession and standing vigil at her coffin in Westminster Hall.
“For the victims that are involved, seeing him in these types of public appearances and being praised by the public, it’s frustrating to them,” Spencer Kevin, a Florida-based lawyer who represented nine of Epstein’s victims, told The Independent.
This is a man they see as someone who is, at the very least, disrespectful to the victims, by his friendship with a pedophile. And for him to be lauded in public, as he’s doing, and to be praised by the public, which is what he’s seeking, is insulting.
Kevin suggested that Andrew may be attempting to “rehabilitate his image in the public,” and said that the Duke of York should have grieved in private instead. Mariann Wang, a New York-based lawyer who represented up to a dozen of Epstein’s victims, agreed, calling Andrew’s appearance in public “quite outrageous.”
Epstein’s victims aren’t the only people upset at Andrew’s recent appearances. As the Queen’s funeral cortege made its way through Edinburgh last weekend, a young man was arrested after he called the prince a “sick old man.”
Epstein and Andrew were friends, and the British royal admitted to staying at Epstein’s properties even after the American financier had been jailed in 2008 for soliciting a child for prostitution. Epstein was arrested again in 2019 and accused of sexually abusing dozens of underage girls but was found dead in his Manhattan jail cell before he could be brought to trial. His death was officially ruled a suicide.
Now watch the stupid sheeple applaud when she says it. Unbelievable dumd asses. Obviously, they don’t understand what a nuclear war will do.
“As the Biden administration stops publishing military expenditures, and we discover Boris Johnson pressured Zelenskyy to ditch peace talks with Russia, we ask, do the West really want this war to end, and in turn a resolution to our energy crisis?”
Amid the mind-numbing eulogies to Queen Elizabeth II, it is frequently asserted that she was “one of us” and “everyone’s grandmother”.
The Queen during her 2015 visit to HMS Ocean in Devonport at a ceremony to rededicate the ship [Photo by Joel Rouse/ Ministry of Defence/Open Government Licence v3.0]
Commentator Andrew Marr, a pillar of the media establishment, wrote a fawning comment in the Times, headlined, “Queen Elizabeth II: the majestic enigma who was one of us”. He went as far as to declare, “During the rawest, roughest years of the Thatcherite experiment, the Queen even seemed dryly oppositionist.”
This claim has been made throughout the media and parroted in ruling circles everywhere. Nothing was ever further from the truth. The queen heads a family of billionaires and lived a life of fabulous and unearned wealth and privilege. She ended her reign at Balmoral Castle, her £140 million private residence, as over 14 million of her “subjects”, including over 4 million children, live in poverty.
As well as Balmoral, the Sandringham House estate, valued at £600 million, was also privately owned by the queen.
Aerial photo of Sandringham House, Norfolk [Photo by John Fielding / CC BY 4.0]
Everything she and her family and relatives possesses is thanks to centuries of pillage and plunder by her forebears. Moreover, most of this staggering wealth is assiduously protected from taxation by the state.
The fortune of the monarch is shrouded in secrecy, but it runs into the many billions of pounds.
According to the Sunday Times Rich List, the queen was personally worth around £370 million. But this was only identifiable wealth. The Paradise Papers, leaked in 2017, show that among the queen’s hidden dealings, via the Duchy of Lancaster estate she owned, was the parking of millions of pounds in a Cayman Islands fund. Part of that fund went to a retailer, BrightHouse, cited for exploiting poor UK families through its hire-to-own scheme.
The queen’s will must now remain under lock and key for 90 years, stemming from a protocol established in 1910. As Reuters noted the monarch’s “will is one of more than 30 kept in a safe in an undisclosed location in London, under the care of a judge. By convention, after a senior royal dies, the executor of their will applies to the head of the London High Court’s Family Division for the will to be sealed. Successive judges in that position have always agreed.”
Sealing the will of the queen’s husband Prince Philip in 2021, the judge declared, “The degree of publicity that publication would be likely to attract would be very extensive and wholly contrary to the aim of maintaining the dignity of the Sovereign.”
Due to a deal between Downing Street and Buckingham Palace in 1993, a vast amount of untaxed wealth cascaded down to Charles III and his successor, Prince William, upon the queen’s death.
Charles inherited from the queen the Duchy of Lancaster estate, established in 1351, which reported net assets of £651 million in the 2021-22 financial year and £24 million in profits.
The income of the Duchy of Cornwall estate, established in 1337 by King Edward III for his heir, was inherited by then Prince Charles upon his 21st birthday. In the 50 years since, Charles piled up staggering wealth through the Duchy now passed to Prince William inheritance tax-free. In the 2021-22 financial year its net assets were valued at £1 billion, with £25 million in profits going into Charles’s pocket.
These revenue sources are dwarfed by the major entity funding the royals, the Crown Estate. Established in 1760, its net assets were valued at £17 billion in 2021/22, with profits of £313 million.
It would take volumes to fully document the resources contained in these estates. The Duchy of Lancaster owns more than 18,000 hectares of land in England and Wales, including farms, homes, and commercial properties. This includes 70 square miles of farmland, 10 castles, a private airfield, and two acres of prime London real estate, including the land beneath the Savoy Hotel.
The Duchy of Cornwall, notes the Financial Times, “owns almost 130,000 acres of land, including the Isles of Scilly, large parts of Dartmoor and 260 farms, and holds £92mn of financial investments. But the bulk of its income comes from its commercial property portfolio, investing in assets such as offices and retail parks.” It adds, “The Duchy owns some of Charles’s residences, such as Highgrove House in Gloucestershire and Llwynywermod, the Carmarthenshire former home of a relative of [queen] Anne Boleyn bought for a reported £1.2mn in 2006.” None of the profits of the dutchy are liable for corporation or capital gains tax.
The main value of the Crown Estate’s assets is contained in a vast property portfolio. Included is a large part of central London comprising some 10 million square feet of land. This includes two entire main thoroughfares, Regents Street and St James Street, and Kensington Palace Gardens.
The rural holdings of the Crown Estate contain around 287,000 acres of agricultural land and forests. Huge mineral wealth is available to them with rights to extract them from 285,500 acres. As of 2018, the estate was extracting sand, gravel, limestone, granite, brick clay, slate, and dimension stone from 34 locations.
The Crown Estate owns virtually all the UK’s seabed up to the 12-nautical-mile (22 km) limit, with the Guardian noting this is “an asset that has become increasingly lucrative since the North Sea oil boom and, more recently, auctions of plots for offshore wind farms.”
An article published in the trade website Fish Farmer this month noted, “As well as a number of rural rents and salmon fishing rights on land, Crown Estate Scotland is responsible for the leasing of virtually all seabed out to 12 nautical miles, covering some 750 fish farming sites and agreements with cables & pipeline operators, and the rights to offshore renewable energy and gas and carbon dioxide storage out to 200 nautical miles from the shore.”
The view of the eastern façade of Buckingham Palace and the Victoria Memorial, seen from the gardens. [Photo by DAVID ILIFF / CC BY-SA 4.0]
Most of the royal palaces are owned by the Crown Estate, including Buckingham Palace (775 rooms) and Windsor Castle (over 1,000 rooms and 300 grand fireplaces), and Charles’s official four-storey London residence, Clarence House. His main country retreat, Highgrove (four reception rooms, nine main bedrooms), is owned by the Duchy of Cornwall, now belonging to Prince William.
The Royal Collection, containing over a million objects, including 7,000 paintings, 500,000 prints, and 30,000 drawings from most of art’s masters, is the largest private art collection in the world and is owned by the reigning monarch in the right of the Crown. Parts of it were privately owned by the queen. The Royal Philatelic Collection of stamps alone is valued at £100 million. Including the Crown Jewels, the Royal Collection is valued at an estimated £10 billion.
St Edward’s Crown, the centrepiece of the Crown Jewels of the United Kingdom [Photo by Firebrace / CC BY-SA 4.0]
Ensuring that the wealth of the royal family remains largely hidden and untouched has been a major pre-occupation of successive governments. In 1993, following a fire a Windsor Castle, and with the monarchy mired in numerous scandals, the question of who would foot the massive bill for the fire damage achieved national prominence.
John Major’s Conservative government came to an arrangement with the queen that for the first time she would voluntarily pay income tax on the Dutchy of Lancaster revenues not used for official purposes. However, the monarch is still not legally obliged to pay any income tax, capital gains tax, or inheritance tax. Major told Parliament, “In the unique circumstances of a hereditary monarchy, special arrangements are needed for inheritance tax.” This was a far more lucrative outcome for the monarchy, dwarfing anything they would go on to pay in income tax.
The 1993 deal allowed that any inheritance passed from “sovereign to sovereign” would avoid the standard 40 percent levy applied to assets valued at more than £325,000. It also ensures that the inheritance of a consort of a former sovereign to a sovereign avoid tax. Within 10 years it ensured that the queen’s mother could pass to the queen an untaxed £70 million.
Since 1760, when George III surrendered control of the Estate’s revenues to the Treasury, the monarch was paid a generous annual grant running into millions, known as the Civil List. This arrangement was altered in 2012, with the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition agreeing with the queen the Civil List’s replacement by a “Sovereign Grant”. This is calculated as a percentage of the income of the Crown Estate, making the maximisation of such revenues of direct financial interest to the monarch. According to the formula, the amount paid out to the monarchy via the grant can never be reduced from the previous year.
The percentage paid back to the monarch as the Sovereign Grant was initially set at 15 percent. In 2016, this was increased for a 10-year period in order to pay for the £369 million refurbishment of Buckingham Palace. Just in the last decade around £600 million has been handed over to the monarchy via the grant, including last year’s £86.3 million.
We’ve lost it. Prince Andrew paid off the woman suing him for sexual abuse Up to £12m And was stripped of military titles as a result Both imply guilt And yet he walks free & will face no justice While a 22-year-old who heckled him is charged with a breach of the peace.
Prince Andrew has settled a civil sexual assault case brought against him in the US by Virginia Giuffre. Ms Giuffre had been suing the Duke of York, claiming he sexually assaulted her on three occasions when she was 17, allegations he has repeatedly denied.Feb 15, 2022
Posh British supermarkets Waitrose and Marks & Spencer have been forced to beef up their security staff… to save their bacon.
It seems the upmarket chains were losing ‘thousands of pounds worth of stock’ every week thanks to hamburglars beating it with their meat. Shoplifting is hardly a new problem, says town manager Robyn Bunyan (who did not mince his words). It was hardly rare before but has been well done in recent months due to lax policing and emboldened criminals, with coppers not having time to grill their suspects. But most of all it’s because of soaring prices bringing out the wurst in people. Quite literally, the steaks have never been higher.
I guess you could say the guards are on a steak out.
Turn on a TV, open a web browser, or scroll social media and you will not be able to avoid headlines and hashtags about Queen Elizabeth II passing away. After news broke that she was under “medical supervision,” media crews have stationed themselves out front of Buckingham Palace and it’s a veritable red carpet event as royals from all over Europe arrive to pay their respects and offer support.
On Thursday, newly elected British PM Liz Truss said the “whole country” was “deeply concerned” over the news of The Queen’s deteriorating health.
“My thoughts – and the thoughts of people across our United Kingdom – are with Her Majesty The Queen and her family at this time,” Truss stated.
Hours later, and surrounded by her royal family, Queen Elizabeth II took her last breath. Now, all the constant reporting has turned to memorialize her.
But is the queen really someone to be hailed as this expounder of all that is good? Should her face be plastered on screens worldwide and a 24/7 memorial be rolled out in her honor? Maybe so, but not for the reasons corporate media will tell you.
On top of mothering a child predator and helping to cover up his crimes, Queen Elizabeth — during her time as a monarch — fleeced the taxpayers of England for hundreds of millions just to pay for her castle.
During this time, she hid her finances offshore — despite the fact that the Royal Family is tax exempt — and made countless billions off the backs of her subjects.
She also oversaw the horrific colonization of multiple territories in Africa and Asia in which people were savagely tortured, their land stolen, and their people slaughtered.
She was tortured with axes during Kenya's struggle for independence from British colonial rule.
As Britain celebrates the Platinum Jubilee of its monarch, this old fighter wants to send her a message: "Let Elizabeth bring what belongs to me." pic.twitter.com/EofKAOqFtW
Africa, asked to celebrate the life of #QueenElizabeth, you only celebrate it correctly by showing what exactly the British did to our ancestors! Subjugation. Torture. Murder. Slavery. Looting of our resources. Don't edit history. Don't use euphemism. Say it the way it is! pic.twitter.com/fz5kpMpW65
Though the Queen-friendly press has tried to downplay her role in the slaughter mentioned above, her racist roots were exposed in a document released last year by the Guardian. The papers revealed that the Queen’s courtiers banned “coloured immigrants or foreigners” from serving in clerical roles in the royal household until at least the late 1960s — when it was no longer considered “acceptable.”
It wasn’t just torture, racism, and covering up her son’s affinity for children either. In one of the most damning admissions to date by the Church of England, the head of the church admitted in 2017 that they “colluded” with and helped to hide the long-term sexual abuse of children and young men.
Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby apologized to the victims who spoke out and helped bring their attacker to justice in 2017. However, according to the report on how the church handled the case, as well as the slap on the wrist ex-bishop Peter Ball, received for decades of abuse, ‘justice’ is a loosely thrown around term.
According to the AP, Welby ordered the report after Ball was convicted and imprisoned in 2015 for misconduct in public office and indecent assaults against teenagers and young men over a period of 20 years.
Despite admitting to sexually abusing 18 people, this serial child rapist was let out of prison after only serving 16 months.
The roots of the Church of England go back to the time of the Roman Empire when Christianity entered the Roman province of Britain and is the official state church of Britain. And, the supreme governor of the church is the Queen herself.
When not covering for pedophiles or overseeing torture, the Queen was also sympathizing with Nazis. In 2015, the Queen was seen on video giving the Nazi salute, during Hitler’s rise to power.
As TFTP reported at the time, in the video the Queen and the Queen’s mum raise their Nazi salutes proudly for the camera.
According to the Sun:
The film shows the then Princess Elizabeth, just seven, larking about in 1933.
Egging on her sister Princess Margaret, three, is their uncle Prince Edward, Prince of Wales. He was a sympathiser towards Hitler’s Nazi Germany and became King Edward VIII.
The stunning film footage of the Queen performing a Nazi salute is today revealed by The Sun.
The astonishing clip lay hidden for eight decades. The grainy home movie is thought to have been shot in 1933 or 1934, as Hitler rose to supreme power in Germany.
It is a matter of historical record that Edward VIII was, in fact, a Nazi sympathizer which makes the claims of childhood fun by the Queen to defend the video, all but irrelevant.
It gets worse, intelligence given to the FBI claimed the Nazis were using the Duke and Duchess to glean information that would scuttle the war effort of the allies and help the Nazis win.
When the Queen isn’t saluting the regime responsible for the horrid deaths of 6 million Jews, she exploits poor and mentally ill individuals.
As TFTP reported, the release of the Paradise Papers, a leak comprised of over 13.4 million documents, exposed the Queen’s insidious exploits of the mentally ill.
The documents included in the leak came from two offshore services providers and the company registries of 19 tax havens, which were obtained by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung and shared by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
The report from ICIJ claimed that according to records from the offshore law firm Appleby, Queen Elizabeth II’s private estate has invested millions of pounds in a Cayman Islands fund that has a history of taking advantage of poor families:
“Queen Elizabeth II has invested millions of dollars in medical and consumer loan companies, Appleby’s files show. While the Queen’s private estate, the Duchy of Lancaster, provides some details of its investments in U.K. property, such as commercial buildings scattered across southern England, it has never disclosed details of its offshore investments.
‘Yes, the Duchy was aware that the Jubilee Absolute Return Fund was run offshore,’ said Chris Addock, chief finance officer of the Duchy of Lancaster.
The records show that as of 2007, the queen’s private estate invested in a Cayman Islands fund that in turn invested in a private equity company that controlled BrightHouse, a U.K. rent-to-own firm criticized by consumer watchdogs and members of Parliament for selling household goods to cash-strapped Britons on payment plans with interest rates as high as 99.9 percent.”
According to a report from the Guardian, which partnered in sharing the revelations from the Paradise Papers, over the span of more than a decade at least, the Queen’s estate has made significant investments in businesses such as the off-license chain Threshers and the retailer BrightHouse.
In 2017, BrightHouse, which is Britain’s biggest rent-to-own retailer, was ordered to pay 14.8 million pounds to 249,000 customers after the watchdog Financial Conduct Authority found that the retailer was guilty of overcharging customers and intentionally taking advantage of people with mental health problems and learning disabilities.
So, to recap, the queen has overseen horrifying torture and occupation for decades, covered for pedophiles, exploited people with disabilities for personal gain, fleece her subjects for billions in tax revenue, and has a history of sympathetic intentions to the Nazis. And, this is by no means, a comprehensive list… there is still much more.
Her legacy is not kindness, altruism, and majesty — it is colonization, brutality, land disposition, mineral theft, and torture.
Africa, asked to celebrate the life of #QueenElizabeth, you only celebrate it correctly by showing what exactly the British did to our ancestors! Subjugation. Torture. Murder. Slavery. Looting of our resources. Don't edit history. Don't use euphemism. Say it the way it is! pic.twitter.com/fz5kpMpW65
After knowing all this, we have to ask ourselves why… why is her face plastered all over televisions, computers, and newspapers? Why are thousands going to weep in the streets for her? Why will corporate media make her out as a hero?
This is not normal. The queen was a monarch, an unaccountable, legally immune descendent of a long line of brutal dictators who continued that role — and no, it wasn’t merely “symbolic.” Society needs to stop celebrating people like this. If we continue to make role models out of abusive tyrants, don’t be surprised when society starts to resemble that very thing.
With Queen Elizabeth dying, you can expect the empire nostalgia to flow freely for the foreseeable future. Always good to keep this quote from John Newsinger’s ‘The Blood Never Dried: A People’s History of the British Empire’ close to hand.
Professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB) and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts
Published On 19 Dec 201819 Dec 2018
Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of India, and his wife, Lady Edwina Mountbatten, ride in the state carriage towards the Viceregal lodge in New Delhi, on March 22, 1947 [File: AP]
There is a story that is commonly told in Britain that the colonisation of India – as horrible as it may have been – was not of any major economic benefit to Britain itself. If anything, the administration of India was a cost to Britain. So the fact that the empire was sustained for so long – the story goes – was a gesture of Britain’s benevolence.
New research by the renowned economist Utsa Patnaik – just published by Columbia University Press – deals a crushing blow to this narrative. Drawing on nearly two centuries of detailed data on tax and trade, Patnaik calculated that Britain drained a total of nearly $45 trillion from India during the period 1765 to 1938.
It’s a staggering sum. For perspective, $45 trillion is 17 times more than the total annual gross domestic product of the United Kingdom today.
How did this come about?
It happened through the trade system. Prior to the colonial period, Britain bought goods like textiles and rice from Indian producers and paid for them in the normal way – mostly with silver – as they did with any other country. But something changed in 1765, shortly after the East India Company took control of the subcontinent and established a monopoly over Indian trade.
Here’s how it worked. The East India Company began collecting taxes in India, and then cleverly used a portion of those revenues (about a third)to fund the purchase of Indian goods for British use. In other words, instead of paying for Indian goods out of their own pocket, British traders acquired them for free, “buying” from peasants and weavers using money that had just been taken from them.
It was a scam – theft on a grand scale. Yet most Indians were unaware of what was going on because the agent who collected the taxes was not the same as the one who showed up to buy their goods. Had it been the same person, they surely would have smelled a rat.
Some of the stolen goods were consumed in Britain, and the rest were re-exported elsewhere. The re-export system allowed Britain to finance a flow of imports from Europe, including strategic materials like iron, tar and timber, which were essential to Britain’s industrialisation. Indeed, the Industrial Revolution depended in large part on this systematic theft from India.
On top of this, the British were able to sell the stolen goods to other countries for much more than they “bought” them for in the first place, pocketing not only 100 percent of the original value of the goods but also the markup.
After the British Raj took over in 1858, colonisers added a special new twist to the tax-and-buy system. As the East India Company’s monopoly broke down, Indian producers were allowed to export their goods directly to other countries. But Britain made sure that the payments for those goods nonetheless ended up in London.
How did this work? Basically, anyone who wanted to buy goods from India would do so using special Council Bills – a unique paper currency issued only by the British Crown. And the only way to get those bills was to buy them from London with gold or silver. So traders would pay London in gold to get the bills, and then use the bills to pay Indian producers. When Indians cashed the bills in at the local colonial office, they were “paid” in rupees out of tax revenues – money that had just been collected from them. So, once again, they were not in fact paid at all; they were defrauded.
Meanwhile, London ended up with all of the gold and silver that should have gone directly to the Indians in exchange for their exports.
This corrupt system meant that even while India was running an impressive trade surplus with the rest of the world – a surplus that lasted for three decades in the early 20th century – it showed up as a deficit in the national accounts because the real income from India’s exports wasappropriatedin its entirety by Britain.
Some point to this fictional “deficit” as evidence that India was a liability to Britain. But exactly the opposite is true. Britain intercepted enormous quantities of income that rightly belonged to Indian producers. India was the goose that laid the golden egg. Meanwhile, the “deficit” meant that India had no option but to borrow from Britain to finance its imports. So the entire Indian population was forced into completely unnecessary debt to their colonial overlords, further cementing British control.
Britain used the windfall from this fraudulent system to fuel the engines of imperial violence – funding the invasion of China in the 1840s and the suppression of the Indian Rebellion in 1857. And this was on top of what the Crown took directly from Indian taxpayers to pay for its wars. As Patnaik points out, “the cost of all Britain’s wars of conquest outside Indian borders were charged always wholly or mainly to Indian revenues.”
And that’s not all. Britain used this flow of tribute from India to finance the expansion of capitalism in Europe and regions of European settlement, like Canada and Australia. So not only the industrialisation of Britain but also the industrialisation of much of the Western world was facilitated by extraction from the colonies.
Patnaik identifies four distinct economic periods in colonial India from 1765 to 1938, calculates the extraction for each, and then compounds at a modest rate of interest (about 5 percent, which is lower than the market rate) from the middle of each period to the present. Adding it all up, she finds that the total drain amounts to $44.6 trillion. This figure is conservative, she says, and does not include the debts that Britain imposed on India during the Raj.
These are eye-watering sums. But the true costs of this drain cannot be calculated. If India had been able to invest its own tax revenues and foreign exchange earnings in development – as Japan did – there’s no telling how history might have turned out differently. India could very well have become an economic powerhouse. Centuries of poverty and suffering could have been prevented.
All of this is a sobering antidote to the rosy narrative promoted by certain powerful voices in Britain. The conservative historian Niall Ferguson has claimed that British rule helped “develop” India. While he was prime minister, David Cameron asserted that British rule was a net help to India.
This narrative has found considerable traction in the popular imagination: according to a 2014 YouGov poll, 50 percent of people in Britain believe that colonialism was beneficial to the colonies.
Yet during the entire 200-year history of British rule in India, there was almost no increase in per capita income. In fact, during the last half of the 19th century – the heyday of British intervention – income in India collapsed by half. The average life expectancy of Indians dropped by a fifth from 1870 to 1920. Tens of millions died needlessly of policy-induced famine.
Britain didn’t develop India. Quite the contrary – as Patnaik’s work makes clear – India developed Britain.
What does this require of Britain today? An apology? Absolutely. Reparations? Perhaps – although there is not enough money in all of Britain to cover the sums that Patnaik identifies. In the meantime, we can start by setting the story straight. We need to recognise that Britain retained control of India not out of benevolence but for the sake of plunder and that Britain’s industrial rise didn’t emerge sui generis from the steam engine and strong institutions, as our schoolbooks would have it, but depended on violent theft from other lands and other peoples.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this article erroneously had the beginning of the British Raj as 1847. The correct year is 1858.
“Our citizens should know the urgent facts…but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths…”—Oliver Stone
Tales from the Conspiratum 