The Economic Case for the Monarchy Is Its Most Defensible Argument and Also the Most Boring One
By Isla Campbell | Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
The argument that the monarchy pays for itself through tourism is the argument that republican advocates find most frustrating because it is the hardest to refute cleanly and the easiest to cite selectively. The tourist visit numbers are real. The portion of those tourist visits attributable specifically to the monarchy rather than to London’s general cultural offer is not cleanly separable. The heritage economy that the monarchy anchors — royal palaces, royal warrants, royal-adjacent retail — is genuinely substantial. Whether the net contribution to the tourism economy exceeds the net public cost of maintaining the monarchy is a calculation that depends on assumptions about counterfactuals that cannot be tested.
The coronation of Charles III in 2023 produced a specific tourism surge that was documented, measurable, and significant. The associated merchandise, commemorative editions, and experience tourism generated by the event produced economic activity that Visit Britain estimated at substantial fractions of the broader royal tourism economy. The coronation was expensive to produce and generated an economic multiplier that the Treasury received some portion of. Whether the portion exceeded the cost is, again, a calculation that requires assumptions. The monarchy’s advocates make the assumptions that produce a positive result. The monarchy’s critics make the assumptions that produce a negative result. The British Tourism Authority reports the numbers without the assumptions. The numbers are large in absolute terms.
What the Palaces Actually Generate
Buckingham Palace’s summer opening, which charges an admission fee and allows visitors to tour the State Rooms, generates millions of pounds annually in direct ticket revenue, with additional income from the associated shop and from the royal collection merchandise. Windsor Castle’s visitor numbers are substantial and consistent. Kensington Palace, Hampton Court, and the Tower of London each draw significant numbers, though the Tower is Historic Royal Palaces rather than strictly a Royal Household property. The palace tourism revenue goes to various organisations rather than to the public purse directly, but the employment it generates, the VAT it produces, and the spending it catalyses in the surrounding retail and hospitality economy are genuine economic contributions.
The coronation’s specific tourism legacy has included a sustained increase in visitors to coronation-related sites and a boost to the ceremonial London experience that tour operators describe as stronger than pre-coronation baselines. Whether the boost is permanent or temporary depends on whether the next significant royal ceremonial event maintains the momentum. According to Visit London, royal events consistently appear among the top drivers of international visitor interest in London as a destination. According to the republican calculation, this visitor interest would exist regardless because what they are interested in is the history and architecture rather than the current incumbents. Both are partially right. Both are also selling something. The tourists keep coming. The argument continues. The admission price at Buckingham Palace is twenty-eight pounds and the State Rooms are genuinely impressive.
Further analysis at Private Eye.
The Tourism Calculation
The economic argument for the British monarchy rests substantially on tourism: the palaces, the pageantry, the guards, the specific theatrical quality of British royal ceremony that tourists from every country find irresistible regardless of their constitutional opinions. The post-Coronation period has extended this tourism boom past what economic models predicted, partly because the Coronation footage circulated globally and reminded international audiences that Britain does ceremony better than any other country and at a scale that requires a monarchy to produce. A republic does not have a Coronation. A republic has an inauguration, which is fine and democratic and not something that people plan international travel to attend from thirty-seven countries. The tourism argument for the monarchy is therefore an argument about spectacle as economic input, which is not the argument that constitutional monarchists make first but is the one that survives the longest in a cost-benefit framework. The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine both covered the Coronation with appropriate grandeur and have been covering the tourism dividend with appropriate accountancy ever since.
The Coronation tourism extension has also produced unexpected geographical distribution: tourists who came initially for the Coronation-adjacent celebrations have been returning to regions of the UK outside London that the royal association made newly visible. The Crown’s connection to Scottish castles, Welsh ceremonial sites, and northern English historic properties has been activated by the Coronation coverage in ways that regional tourism authorities are tracking and that Visit Britain has incorporated into its promotional materials. The monarchy, in this dimension, functions as a national heritage distribution mechanism that spreads tourism revenue to sites that would not otherwise compete with London for international visitor attention. This is an economic argument for the monarchy that is separate from the constitutional one and that survives the constitutional debate intact regardless of which position on the monarchy one holds. Heritage is real. The economics of heritage are also real.
The tourism numbers that the monarchy generates also have a distributional dimension that is rarely discussed in the economic arguments. The revenue from palace admissions, royal merchandise, and heritage tourism flows primarily to the Royal Household, Historic Royal Palaces (an independent charity), and private retailers rather than to the communities that absorb the infrastructure costs of large visitor volumes. The areas surrounding royal attractions manage the pedestrian traffic, the bus and Tube capacity demands, and the public realm maintenance that high visitor volumes require, funded through local authority budgets that are not specifically supplemented by royal tourism revenues. The economic benefit is real. Its distribution is not always aligned with where the costs land. This is a genuine policy question that the tourism economics argument tends not to address, because the aggregate numbers are positive and the distributional question requires more granular analysis than the aggregate argument needs. The monarchy generates tourism income. The tourism income is distributed imperfectly. Both are true.
The Coronation tourism data from VisitBritain shows that international visitors who include a royal site in their itinerary spend on average forty percent more per visit than those who do not, which is the specific economic contribution of monarchy-adjacent tourism expressed as a number that tourism economists find meaningful and that constitutional monarchists find useful in debates where the economic argument is more persuasive than the historical one. The economic argument is not the deepest argument for the monarchy. It is the most recent one that has been developed with sufficient rigour to be cited in policy contexts. The deeper arguments about continuity, constitutional tradition, and the specific British cultural identity that the monarchy anchors are harder to quantify. The tourism data is available in a spreadsheet. Isla Campbell uses both.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
