Time for the UK to take back the American colonies?

Just a thought.

I was checking through the news items on yahoo.com (US, not UK or Germany. You get a lot of stories on baseball which is becoming my overriding interest at the moment - which it will remain as long as the Red Sox are doing well!) the other day.

There were no fewer than five stories on British royalty. This is news aimed at the American public. The American colonies chose in 1776 to rid themselves of the British monarchy. It was a proverbial yoke, it wasn't needed.

So why all this nonsense about British royalty on an American news feed? It couldn't be that the USA wants the monarchy back? Take one step further, maybe baby wants to come home to mama after 237 years? Maybe it wasn't too clever leaving in the first place ....

OK, satire aside, why Americans are following all this "made in the UK" nonsense about British royalty totally baffles me. For one thing they are better off without it! And if you bother checking, the UK taxpayer is responsible for paying a substantial chunk in tax to maintain all the royal household (which is not, like most of us have (if we are lucky), a couple of rooms plus kitchen, bedroom, bathroom and toilet - it is slightly more than that).

As I recall it was the dislike of the British establishment demanding tax from the colonies that set off the demand for independence in the first place. Of course they could work out a deal where the "American colonies" don't have to sign up again to be part of the UK, but will gladly pay tax for the upkeep of the British royal family. I am sure that British taxpayers will like this idea and it will give a new meaning to the "special relationship"!  And we all know how much Americans, particularly conservative Americans, love paying tax, don't we?

Meanwhile as a British passport holder living in the Federal REPUBLIC of Germany and a person committed to fully elected democratic republics with no leadership (constitutional or otherwise) gained through inheritance, I would like to say that we have none of that nonsense here.

I would like to say it, but I would be lying. Last time I checked yahoo.de there seemed to be a proliferation of stories on there about "die Queen" (not "die Königin" - please note that "die" here means "the", it is nowt to do with dying). One of the German TV channels even has a royal correspondent now (they also look at stories at monarchies in Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, Spain, Belgium usw - it is not exclusively the UK which is of "interest").

I would also have expected the Germans to know better - the last monarch they had here (actually an Emperor), Kaiser Wilhelm II left with his proverbial tail between his legs in 1918 and fled to Holland following the defeat of the German Empire in the First World War. I haven't heard any demand for the German royal family to resume power (even in a constitutional role). Nor do I hope that they will.

There is actually still a claimant to the German throne - Prinz Georg Friedrich of Prussia. He lives in Bremen (not Berlin) and according to Wikipedia, the source of all relevant information (satire), he "currently works for a company specialising in helping universities bring their innovations to market". Which sounds a more useful job than those carried out by most of his counterparts in other countries who still hold official positions and get paid accordingly to sit round sumptuous palaces thanks to the generosity of the taxpayer .....