This article appears in the February 26, 2021 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
Queen Making ‘Windfall’ of
Billions From Green Genocide
[Print version of this article]
Feb. 19—The British Royal Family is raking in billions of pounds off the Empire’s green genocide policy. For the Royal household, the Great Reset will mean a gain of over £3 billion ($4.2 billion) over the next ten years from operators of offshore wind farms. While the United Kingdom has the world’s largest offshore wind sector, the companies who operate these wind farms pay a tithe to the Queen through the Crown Estate. The latter manages the lands and other holdings in England, Wales and Northern Ireland belonging to the monarch, which include the entire seabed along the coastline of those three territories.
According to The Guardian, in the last ten years the Crown Estate has collected in “rent” more than £4 billion ($5.6 billion) from licenses sold through auction for the operation of wind farms on the Queen’s seabed. While 75% of these funds go into the United Kingdom’s treasury, the Queen’s household skims off 25%, close to a £1 billion. This is about to double over the next ten years with the auctioning of six new licenses announced on February 8.
The auction winners will have to pay annually £879 million over the next decade. This will double the £345 million the Crown Estate raked in last year, and therefore double the Queen’s take as well. The winners of the bids included BP, the German utility EnBW, Germany’s RWE, and the Green Investment Group, among others.
The Queen can thank former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair for the windfall, since it was in 2004 under his government that the Crown Estate was given the renewable energy exploitation rights. Boris Johnson, the current Prime Minister, may outdo Blair; he has called for every home in the UK to be powered by offshore wind by 2030.
Even the journal of the wind farm industries expressed “dismay” at the “bonkers” revenues the Queen is getting.
Wind Farm Profits to the Monarchy
The realm of Elizabeth and Princes Philip and Charles is considered the best location in Europe for wind power and operates one-third of the offshore wind farm capacity of Europe, and 6th largest total wind capacity in the world. In 2019, there were 10,930 wind turbines operating in the British Isles, accounting for 24.1 gigawatts—13.7 gigawatts onshore and another 10.4 offshore—amounting to 20% of the country’s power production. Capacity will increase to 40 gigawatts by 2030 with the majority being offshore.
The Kingdom was among the pioneers in offshore wind farms with the Crown Estate at the center of the planning and execution. Discussions between the Crown Estate and the British Wind Energy Association (now known as Renewable UK) occurred in 1998, and in 2004 the Labor government of Tony Blair gave the Crown responsibility for offshore wind farms. In 2003 the first auctions took place for offshore licenses. When the first wind farms came online in 2010, the cost of their electricity was £131 per megawatt-hour compared with the average market price of £40-50. It was only through the creation of the carbon tax that wind power could be made competitive.
According to the Crown Estate website, they are already “unlocking” more value and more profits for the royals, by issuing licenses for sites for CO2 storage beneath the seabed in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and within the Exclusive Economic Zone. The Crown Estate controls the tidal river basins, and can issue licenses to developers for wave and tidal-current energy projects, including technologies ranging from small-scale prototypes to demonstration zones, in a variety of site conditions.
The Queen is not just getting a cut for wind farm licenses, but also the income generated by other assets under the control of the Crown Estate. These assets have a value of over £14 billion and include 792,000 hectares (1.960 million acres) of territory, an area three times the size of Luxembourg. This includes half of the country’s seabed, forest and agricultural lands, and urban properties. The last includes commercial real estate, including shopping centers and Regent Street in central London. They are also responsible for licensing the seabed for the laying of cables and pipelines, as a well as the exploitation of marine aggregates (sand and gravel), all producing income of which 25% goes to the Queen’s Household.
But it wasn’t always this way. The monarch had not been entitled to a single penny from the Crown Estate ever since 1760, when King George III had surrendered that right in return for an annual grant from the Civil List, i.e., the government. But in April of 2012, the British government decided to turn the clock back to a feudal form of payment. Under the terms of the Sovereign Grant Act 2011, the Civil List was abolished and the monarch would receive funds indexed to a percentage of the Crown Estate’s annual net revenue. Originally set at 15%, it was subsequently increased to 25% in 2016 on the pretext of needing more funds for renovating the Queen’s palaces. And the payment was no longer subject to debate in parliament.
Labour and Tories Serve the Crown
To maintain the illusion of transparency, the Royal finances are overseen by the “Royal Trustees” who include the Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the Keeper of the Privy Purse. It is these three who determine how much of the royal cut is actually disbursed. Theoretically any surplus is supposed to go to a reserve fund and to the Treasury, and shortfalls have to be financed through the government with parliamentary approval.
This change occurred under the Conservative government led by David Cameron. After coming to power in 2010, he notoriously implemented a policy of brutal austerity, which saw cuts in the British healthcare system, leading to the high number of deaths during the current pandemic. Nonetheless in 2016, Cameron’s government approved the decision to increase the Royal cut from 15% to 25%, allowing the Queen’s income to increase exponentially. In 2012-13, her income was £31 million. It jumped 16.5% in 2014-2015 reaching £37.9 million, and in 2017-18 it reached £76.1 million, well over double the figure for 2012-12! It has continued to increase, reaching £82.4 million ($115 million) last year. With the new offshore wind farm licenses, it is set to double again.
The justification for these huge increases includes renovating Buckingham palace, but also financing the “duties” of the members of the royal household as representatives of the Sovereign, who is in the UK the Head of State. This includes all of Charles’ official visits in which he pushes his green genocide agenda. These trips cost a quarter to a half million pounds each, exclusive of the costs picked up by the host countries.
Green Genocide and British Imperial Institutions
Make no mistake, the policy of green genocide and the windfall profits of the royal household are one policy, initiated by and for the benefit of the British Empire. In his article, “Prince Charles Invented and Runs the Green New Deal,” Richard Freeman writes:
[The power of Prince Charles derives] from being embedded in a network of institutions. One such institution is the Monarchy, which consists not just of the royals, but hundreds of persons from Oxford and Cambridge Universities, and law firms. Indeed, the Monarchy is embedded in a quartet consisting of the City of London, the Bank of England, and the intelligence services, which had been in operation since the 1694 creation of the Bank of England.
In many respects this system operates independent of the government and in legal grey zones that have been maintained between the Monarchy and the Government.
The Crown Estate operates as a statutory corporation under the Crown Estate Act of 1961. Yet the assets it manages are not the property of the Government or the nation but the “Sovereign,” i.e., the Monarchy. Its assets are defined in the Crown Estate annual report, “as the hereditary possessions of the Sovereign in right of the Crown, in other words, lands owned by the Crown Corporately.” These assets date back to the Norman Conquest of 1066.
While the annual report claims the Sovereign has no role in the management, the Crown Estate’s website says, “The Chief Executive and Chairman meets with Her Majesty the Queen once each year to report on the performance of The Crown Estate,” and its annual report is addressed to the Queen. Among its directors can be found those who are well embedded in this quartet of institutions. Its Chairman in 2011, when the Sovereign grant began, was Sir Stuart Hampson, a businessman who still serves as The Prince of Wales Ambassador in the area of Economic Renewal and has been a member of the Corporate Leaders Group lobbying the government on climate change. Upon leaving the chairmanship of the Crown Estate in 2016, he was made Commander in the Royal Victorian Order, the knightly order reserved for those who have given personal service to the Monarchy. A Freemason, Hampson served as Senior Grand Warden of the United Grand Lodge of England for 2016-17, the Grand Master of which is the Queen’s first cousin, the Duke of Kent.
The current non-executive chairman of the Crown Estate is the banker Robin Budenberg, CBE, whose career included positions at S.G. Warburg and UBS Investment bank; he is currently non-executive director of Lloyds Banking Group, one of the largest in the City. He earned his CBE for bailing out the City of London in 2008—specifically, his part in designing the Government Bank Recapitalization Scheme. From 2010 to 2014, Budenberg was Chief Executive and then Chairman of UK Financial Investments, the UK government body that oversees the government’s stake in the banks it bailed out.
Of special note is another non-executive director, Juliet Davenport, OBE. She is the founder and chief executive of Good Energy, a “sustainable” energy company that operates wind farms and solar parks. She received her OBE for promoting sustainable energy. In 2016 Prince Charles conferred on her the honorary title of Professor of Practice of the Harmony Institute at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, of which Charles is the Royal Patron. The institute promotes Charles’ version of the idea that humankind must live in harmony with nature. Davenport lives in Gloucestershire in southwest England, where Highgrove House, the family residence of the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, is located.
Davenport’s husband, Mark Shorrock heads a company called Tidal Lagoon, whose goal is to build a tidal generator at Swansea Bay in southwest Wales not far from Gloucestershire; and others at Cardiff Newport, Colwyn Bay, West Cumbria, Bridgewater Bay, and locations in France, Canada, Mexico and India. None of these projects has gotten off the drawing boards. While the British government has yet to show interest in financing these projects, all will require licenses from the Crown Estate, which has already been in discussions with Shorrock over possible licensing. Financing might not be far off.
The most important non-executive director in Tidal Lagoon is Jay Hambro, scion of the famous Anglo-Danish banking family, who is currently the Chief Investment Officer of the GFG Alliance, the company of the Anglo-India Gupta family of billionaires. Jay Hambro’s boss Sanjeev Gupta is Prince Charles’ official ambassador for the Industrial Cadets program. At the opening ceremony of GFG Alliance’s Liberty Specialty Steels factory at Rotherham, Charles reignited the large electric arc furnace of what is now the UK’s largest “Green steel” plant. “Green steel” is recycled scrap steel.
If the Guptas invest any of their billions in Tidal Lagoon projects, the Queen will get her cut.
‘Her Majesty’s Faithful Commons’
One might ask whose interests the duly elected Parliament is serving in all of this. One only has to read from the preamble to the relevant chapter of the Sovereign Grant Act of 2011 to get an idea:
WHEREAS Your Majesty has been graciously pleased to signify to Your faithful Commons in Parliament assembled that Your Majesty is desirous that consideration should be given by Your faithful Commons to the provision made by Parliament for the financial support of Your Majesty and other members of the Royal Household, and to allow for the continuation of support in the reigns of Your successors....
Now, therefore, we, Your Majesty’s most dutiful and loyal subjects, the Commons of the United Kingdom in Parliament assembled, have freely and voluntarily resolved to make such provision as hereinafter appears for the purposes aforesaid, and we do most humbly beseech Your Majesty that it may be enacted, and be it enacted by the Queen’s most Excellent Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, in this present Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same....
Prince William:
Bringing Optimism to Green Genocide
Even monarchs die, so Prince Philip and Prince Charles are preparing the third generation of Green monarchs, Prince William, who could soon become the Prince of Wales, were the 95-year-old Queen to join her ancestors. Now he is being prepared to be the King of “Genocide with an optimistic face.”
His retooling began last October with the release of a Netflix film entitled Prince William: A Planet For Us All, in which he announced a royal fund to finance no less than £50 million in prizes—£5 million per year for a decade—to developers of inventions to support the protection of the environment. Financed out of William’s own Royal Foundation, the program is dubbed “Earthshot” to mimic John F. Kennedy’s “Moon shot.”
William is seen on camera with Sir David Attenborough, Prince Charles’ top environmentalist guru, at his side, and confesses he has had “a change in outlook” on life:
My grandfather and my father have been in environmental work for many years. My grandfather’s well ahead of his time. My father, ahead of his time. And I really want to make sure that, in 20 years, George doesn’t turn ’round and say, “Are you ahead of your time?” Because if he does, we’re too late.
The film was two years in the making and shows William claiming he has always been a “passionate conservationist,” while he can be seen with Kate (Princess of Cambridge) watching rhinos in Tanzania and glaciers in the Hindu Kush in Pakistan—while saying he felt compelled to take action so that his children get to see these animals. His message is to be “optimistic” about change.
The week of the film’s release, William was featured on the BBC promoting it and his project. He also gave a talk on the TED platform with the message of “optimism” in fighting climate change.
William’s environmentalist activities have not stopped since. As recently as February 7 he addressed a group of seven young people named 2020 Young Champions of the Earth by the UN Environment Program (UNEP), among them an engineer who turns rubbish into paving stones. It is obviously hoped that for brainwashing young people William will be more credible than his father.
William’s foundation and its “United for Wildlife” section have a financial committee which comprises 38 institutional backers, most of which are the world’s leading banks: ANZ Banking Group, Banco Santander Group, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Barclays Bank, BNP Paribas, Citigroup, the City of London Corporation, and others. William’s foundation chair is Lord William Hague, former UK Foreign Minister and leader of the Conservative Party.
