The value of the Monarchy should not be underestimated - Yorkshire Post Letters

I don't profess to know where Malcolm Naylor (Letters 11/10) gets his "facts" from, but think his claims shouldn't go unchallenged.

His contention that the monarchy "exists to sustain privilege and inequality" is at best his opinion.

In fact his exalted view of "democracy" and the idea that legitimacy can only come from election is a kind of religion if it is anything.

One need only look around the world to see that election guarantees nothing and not infrequently leads to very bad Heads of State.

So far as the funding of the monarchy is concerned, what happens is this. All the revenues of the Crown Estate are paid directly to the Treasury.

The Treasury then returns a small proportion of those revenues to the King in the form of something called the Sovereign Grant. That grant doesn't go into the King's back pocket at all.

It has to fund repairs to historic royal palaces, such as Buckingham Palace, which are official residences, not the Sovereign's private property to dispose of as He will.

It also pays for the cost of entertaining foreign dignitaries on behalf of the Government, an important part of maintaining good diplomatic relations with other countries.

If Mr Naylor thinks that the work of royals consists of "giving orders to others or going on taxpayer funded jaunts to patronise the gullible", he must live on a different planet to the one I do.

Can I take it that Mr Naylor has never been relentlessly pursued by red boxes full of papers that need to be read, understood and signed, or had to endure boring or cringeworthy public engagements for hours on end?

It is true that the Monarch can technically withhold Royal Assent to Acts of Parliament but that hasn't happened in practice since the days of Queen Victoria.

Most of the surviving "royal prerogatives" to which Mr Naylor refers, and they are actually very few, aren't exercised by the Sovereign in person but by Government Ministers.

If Mr Naylor thinks that homelessness, a complex problem with many different causes, or the problems of the poor, would be alleviated by defunding or abolishing the Monarchy, he is very badly informed indeed.

There is a bottom line and that is that we would need a Head of State, but Mr Naylor offers no clue as to what form that might take.

A constitutional Monarchy comes at practically no cost to the taxpayer and provides us with a Head of State who isn't a politician and around whom people of all stripes and none can unite.

Abolishing the Monarchy would mean ending the historic and fruitful relationship between Church and State.

It would also mean substantially rewriting the Book of Common Prayer, not something that this member of the Prayer Book Society views with any great favour.

What we have is good and Mr Naylor should be careful about what he wishes for.

If he wants to live in a country which doesn't have a monarchy, he is perfectly free to go and do so, without infringing on the rights of those of us who value what we have.