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UK Politics - Democracy for the 0.27% - Worst Past The Post edition


Which Tyler

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I'd estimate a couple of thousand watch changing of the guard. Blenheim figures are 600k a year. So pretty similar. Also one is in the middle of the biggest city in Europe and one is rural Oxfordshire so they are not exactly comparable. 

People still visit the tower of London, any current prince's being held? 

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5 minutes ago, BigFatCoward said:

I'd estimate a couple of thousand watch changing of the guard. Blenheim figures are 600k a year. So pretty similar. Also one is in the middle now the biggest city in Europe and one is rural Oxfordshire so they are not exactly comparable. 

People still visit the tower of London, any current prince's being held? 

Blenheim gets about half the number of visitors as Kew Gardens, it’s not even in london. Most tourists to the UK go to london and I’d say a vast majority want to go see Buckingham palace. I’ve been there enough times with foreign friends and relatives to know they always wanna go on the off chance the Queen is there, even if they know it’s very unlikely. It’s the obsession with the royal family fuelling that interest. 
 

The Tower of London a proper historical monument built by the Norman’s, it’s not surprising it gets a lot of visitors. 
 

If you wanna make a point about getting rid of the royal family that is fine, but your going down the wrong path with this argument.

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22 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

It’s the obsession with the royal family fuelling that interest. 

Eh, they can live somewhere elsewhere for the public to potentially gawk at them and the tourists will still come.

 

Or perhaps a middle eastern oil baron could lease the place out to the royals after buying and try to make bank off the tourists coming to see them? This proposition I make in slight jest admittedly.

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42 minutes ago, Heartofice said:

Blenheim gets about half the number of visitors as Kew Gardens, it’s not even in london. Most tourists to the UK go to london and I’d say a vast majority want to go see Buckingham palace. I’ve been there enough times with foreign friends and relatives to know they always wanna go on the off chance the Queen is there, even if they know it’s very unlikely. It’s the obsession with the royal family fuelling that interest. 
 

The Tower of London a proper historical monument built by the Norman’s, it’s not surprising it gets a lot of visitors. 
 

If you wanna make a point about getting rid of the royal family that is fine, but your going down the wrong path with this argument.

How many people visit Versailles every year? Hasn’t been any royalty there for a while.

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14 minutes ago, DaveSumm said:

How about, whoever wins Love Island* gets to live at Buckingham Palace for a year? That’d keep the tourists coming.
 

*I’ve never seen it, no idea if it even has a winner

Hell make a lottery for people to be King or queen for a year subject to immediate termination(firing) should they act up.

 

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I think if the best argument for retaining the monarchy is that Buckingham Palace works as a particularly crappy sort of human zoo, you've really got to go back to the drawing board.

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43 minutes ago, Denvek said:

How many people visit Versailles every year? Hasn’t been any royalty there for a while.

Versailles is much more admired architecturally, has better weather, the lingering glamour of the Sun King, and some pretty famous gardens too. If Buckingham Palace wasn't the monarchy's main residence and symbol, I doubt its lumpen massiveness would be much of a draw on its own. 

 

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19 minutes ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

Hell make a lottery for people to be King or queen for a year subject to immediate termination(firing) should they act up.

 

Na, we should be sending out the MPs to scour the land for an infant born at the minute the Queen died. 

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2 minutes ago, dog-days said:

Versailles is much more admired architecturally, has better weather, the lingering glamour of the Sun King, and some pretty famous gardens too. If Buckingham Palace wasn't the monarchy's main residence and symbol, I doubt its lumpen massiveness would be much of a draw on its own. 

 

It’s a decidedly unimpressive building on its own.

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Maybe I'm an outlier, but I'm much more interested in the long dead kings queens and princes than the currently living ones. Turn Buckingham palace into an interactive wax museum of all the olde royals and pay to go in.

I don't know what to say about people who are obsessed with seeing a glimpse of a royal. It makes no sense, and it accords them some kind of status above being a mere mortal. They have to eat, sleep, evacuate and eventually die like everyone else.

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15 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Maybe I'm an outlier, but I'm much more interested in the long dead kings queens and princes than the currently living ones. Turn Buckingham palace into an interactive wax museum of all the olde royals and pay to go in.

I don't know what to say about people who are obsessed with seeing a glimpse of a royal. It makes no sense, and it accords them some kind of status above being a mere mortal. They have to eat, sleep, evacuate and eventually die like everyone else.

Why are people obsessed with anyone famous? I am not really interested in the lives of the royals but have to accept that a lot of people around the world are. They certainly do more to project the British image globally than May, Boris or Truss 

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1 hour ago, dog-days said:

Versailles is much more admired architecturally, has better weather, the lingering glamour of the Sun King, and some pretty famous gardens too. If Buckingham Palace wasn't the monarchy's main residence and symbol, I doubt its lumpen massiveness would be much of a draw on its own. 

 

I was a bit underwhelmed by Versailles, and its gardens.  I've always far preferred Hampton Court Palace.  If I were king, that's where I'd want to live.  It's far more attractive architecturally, than Buckingham Palace, with a much more interesting history.

The problem with the gardens at Versailles - to me at any rate - is that they're all geometric patterns, and little lollipop trees and fountains, rather than the more naturalistic style of gardening that's favoured in this country. 

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I think what people are missing in this discussion is the amount of butthurt a royal eviction would create in your population of authoritarians. They are, indeed, your nation's most potent source of butthurt. Such a wellspring of resentment, properly channeled, is powerful enough to, I don't know, cut the UK out of the EU, or keep an incompetent government in power long enough to make Prince Andrew sweat.

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This sounds quite important: researchers from the Francis Crick Institute have found that air pollution causes cancer, not through damaging healthy cells, but by causing old cells in the lungs to reactivate when a chemical alarm is provoked by the inhalation of particulate matter. 

The article talks about the possibility of people living in areas with high atmospheric pollution taking a pill to block the alarm. Would be nice if we could get rid of the air pollution instead, mind. 

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8 hours ago, dog-days said:

tourists describe as attracting them to the UK.

For me it's that every bit of it is the history I know, political, cultural, economic, artistic and literary.  I grew up on all of it, and continued ever since in every expanding manner.  My last trips, when we were still able to go there, were to the enclaves of the economics of British slavery, such as Liverpool and the museum there for the African Atlantic Slave Trade, and so on and so forth.  And to see friends. And it is beautiful, or at least some parts (still) are.  Not for the food (though for the beer, yes).  Not for these royals.  For so many of us, for better or worse, what attracts us to the UK is its past, not its present. Among our friends here quite a few of them have gone regularly because of the theater.  They gorge themselves for two-three weeks going to everything!  Not once have we had even a thought to go to Buck and watch the changing of the guard.  Good grief why would anyone?

I may well not be representative.  But I love that strange suspension of being somewhere that I don't know, that is so different while feeling so familiar at the same time.  I get quite a bit of that in Spain too, but not in France.  Language must play a big role in that.

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