The Queen is the head of state of the United Kingdom government (as well as several others), so she does have some official duties which in more civilized countries are granted to elected leaders.

I like the English monarchy on utilitarian political grounds. IIRC, she has to sign off on every piece of legislation, and does so by rote, which is an aid to her role. That role being the symbolic, spiritual, religious head of state. But I think she is an impediment to extremism. Theoretically, SCOTUS performs part of that role, but SCOTUS has become politicized.

If the US had someone both parties respected, admired, and loved, mostly because she rarely if ever took partisan positions...if that person were to come out and say "This country does not do torture and suspend habeus corpus" it might have some weight. Might not, but worth $100 million to keep a nation from goin over the edge.

Royalty are also museum equivalents, and provide continuity and national identity. Those might be bad things, but many people seem to enjoy them.

I agree with rd on the tourism advantage. I'm no fan of the English monarchy personally, but I'd say that the free advertising alone is easily worth 68 million a year.

Why wouldn't you do that?

Every country needs someone to represent the nation as head of state, welcome foreign politicans, open bridges etc.

Anyway a lot of the 37 million quid actually goes to pay for the upkeep of various royal buildings which , as historic buldings,would still be paid for by the state even if the UK became a republic.

And in comparison to, say japan whose royal family costs them 75 million a quid a year, i'd say we're getting a bargain.

It's an interesting thing - because the royals (in European monarchies) have no real power and plenty of money, they are more or less incorruptible. That can be very useful.

Tradition.

I don't understand the attractions of monarchy myself, but English friends and acquaintances say: "Because with all our faults, we love our Queen."

It's just more dramatic to behead a King or Queen than an elected official. They've just been keeping that option in reserve for the last 357 years.

Just think how Henry VIII would have handled the Lady Di problem. And she had that long, lovely neck too.

Reminds me of the scene in "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" where the British agent asks Alan Quartermain (Sean Connery) where is his "patriotism". Quartermain leaps up, raises his class to the African club and shouts, "God save the Queen!" Everybody raises their glass and repeats the slogan.

Then he says, "That's about as patriotic as it gets around here."

The money issue seems highly dubious to me as well. One point on this is that while the government spends a fair amount of money on the Privy Purse for the monarch and royal family, the government also *gets* a lot of money through its use of the revenues of the Crown Estates, which they are only allowed to do due to a voluntary agreement with the monarch - one that has to be renewed by each new monarch (Charles, iirc, has made noises that he might not renew the deal when he becomes King).

Beyond this is the question of how much money a President would cost. Presumably, if Britain became a republic, it would remain a parliamentary republic, with a president as mostly ceremonial head of state. This would also cost money. Presumably he'd be put up at a palace of some sort (perhaps Buckingham Palace, or maybe Kensington Palace or something if Buckingham is too closely associated with the monarchy), in the way that the President of France lives in the Elysée and the President of Italy (completely ceremonial) in the old royal palace, the Quirinal. And, as pointed out above, the monarchy spends a lot of money on things that the government would otherwise have to do.

In terms of why particular countries have monarchies, I think if you look at the countries that still have monarchies, ignoring the microstates, you have the UK, Spain, Benelux, and Scandinavi. What you'll notice about all these countries, except for Spain, is that they've been stable. There've been no revolutions, and the countries have been constitutional monarchies for a long long time. Monarchies don't tend to be eliminated in peaceful referenda in situations like this. In fact, I can't think of any examples of a monarchy having been gotten rid of in a situation like this. There were relatively fair referenda that abolished the monarchies in Italy and Greece, but in both cases this was after the monarchy had completely discredited itself by getting in bed with dictatorships (also, note, the Greek monarchy was actually eliminated by said dictatorship before restoration of democracy. Short of Queen Margrethe allying herself to a fascist who marches on Copenhagen wit his blackshirts, or King Albert swearing in a junta of junior military officers who overthrew the democratically elected government, I don't see why we should expect that Europe's remaining monarchies will go anywhere.

Spain is a special case, with the restoration of the monarchy in 75 being due to Franco, and its survival due to Juan Carlos's own personality and actions, I think.