MorphingDragon said:
The Royal Family still owns the land is pretty much the gist.
I hate that video.
Yes, the queen technically "owns" the crown estate.
You know what else the queen technically owns? Here's a clue.
If the queen owns the crown estate, then she also owns the UK's national debt. All £1,300 billion of it, costing £43 billion a year in interest.
Frankly, if she wants to keep her own shit on the day we all finally see sense and get rid of the monarchy, that's fine by me.
In a monarchy, at least in a traditional European monarchy like ours, all public institutions are technically the property of the monarch. Since we are a constitutional monarchy, this does
not mean that the monarchy actually has any legal claim to ownership. It's simply the confusing result of the historical fact that we have no state. As Louis XIV once put it, the monarch
is the state.
The first task of any new republic would be to legally change that by creating a state distinct from the monarch. The monarch in that situation would have very little claim to the crown estate.