Are the royals racist? “We’re very much not a racist family,” Prince William responded to suggestions from Meghan Markle, in her notorious Oprah interview, that they very much were and it had made her almost suicidal.

Even discounting the late Prince Philip’s colourful phraseologies about people in most of the rest of the world, it can’t be judged one way or the other whether the monarchy is or isn’t, because of an arcane, 300-year-old get-out which exempts them from race relations legislation and other laws.

It’s called Queen’s consent and it allows her and Prince Charles to vet or veto any parliamentary legislation which might affect them, personally or in their public roles, however obscurely. The Scottish Parliament also follows suit.

Until the 1990s, the Queen had grown up and reigned surrounded by an all-white cast of courtiers, presumable ignorant of, or unquestioning, that “coloured immigrants or foreigners” were banned from serving in clerical roles in the royal household. They could be servants, but no higher.

It was in 1968 that the Queen’s chief financial manager told civil servants that “it was not, in fact, the practice to appoint coloured immigrants or foreigners” to clerical roles in the royal household.

It is not known when this ended as Buckingham Palace has refused to answer questions about the ban and when it was revoked, although its records show people from ethnic minorities being employed in the 1990s. But they don’t have records before then. Which is either careless or convenient.

In the 1970s, the Labour government had brought in three laws outlawing racial and sexual discrimination in the workplace. But staff in the royal household were exempted and specifically prevented from taking action under them. The exemption has been extended to the present day when, in 2010 the Equality Act replaced the 1976 Race Relations Act, the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act and the 1970 Equal Pay Act.

Beyond the law

If you’re looking to use freedom of information law to look into any staff grievances or the houses, lands and allowances we pay for, then good luck with that, because it’s almost all beyond the law. Information about the royals is subject to exemptions and restrictions which apply to no other part of the public sector – and surely they are undeniably part of the public sector?

Queen’s consent, which isn’t a Netflix series and is very different to royal assent, requires that any parliamentary bill apparently affecting the interests of the Queen or the Prince of Wales needs their assent.

And because the royals are also employers, landlords, pay tax, run pension schemes, have rivers and lakes and lands, their agreement is needed on a huge range of legislation – which means the Queen and Charles have an effective veto on the bits they don’t like.

Buckingham Palace is keen to maintain that the Queen’s role is purely a ceremonial one and that “any assertion that the sovereign has blocked legislation is simply incorrect”. Which is technically true but utterly misleading. She doesn’t block legislation because she doesn’t need to.

Before the third reading of a bill which may concern her it is sent to the palace and her legal advisers Farrer & Co who have two or more weeks for consideration. It is then amended to meet her wishes. If it isn’t it doesn’t go through. It is then revised and sent back. The final bill quickly becomes the act when she nods through her royal assent.

Consent also gives the unelected Queen the power to require changes to draft legislation in order to benefit her financially, or to exempt her from laws she doesn’t like or don’t benefit her. And there is a host of instances – over 1,000 revealed by The Guardian newspaper – where she, or Charles, have done just that.

Leaked papers

IN the 1970s, Queen’s consent was used to persuade, or force, the government to exempt the her from having to reveal the scope of her investments. In 2017, the leaked Paradise Papers revealed that many of her millions were in offshore tax havens, including the notorious Cayman Islands.

In 1981, the House of Windsor secured a court ruling that royal wills should be closed to the public – this was then enshrined in the Senior Courts Act. Princess Diana’s will was an exception.

This merely carried on the secrecy dating back to1911when the wills of members of the royal family were officially sealed and not open to public inspection, originally to conceal that Queen Mary’s brother, Prince Francis of Teck, who died at Balmoral aged 40, had left expensive jewellery – the Cambridge Emeralds – to his mistress, the society beauty Ellen Constance, inconveniently married to the Earl of Kilmorey.

Fast-forward to 2011 and the Sovereign Grant Act which replaced the old civil list and which again required Queen’s assent.

That act immeasurably increased her wealth, including revenues for the use of the seabed up to 12 nautical miles from land for offshore wind power, money which had previously gone to the Treasury.

A blank cheque

IN 2010/11 the civil list gave her £7.9 million, around £15m today. The Sovereign Grant for 2020/21 is £85.9m. Not so much marking your own homework as filling in the figures on a blank cheque.

In a bizarre application of consent, police are also banned from searching for stolen or looted artefacts on the Queen’s private estates, for some motive wreathed in secrecy.

The 2017 Cultural Property Act enshrined a 1954 United Nations treaty aimed at preventing the destruction of art works in future wars, following the Nazis’ looting and destruction in the Second World War.

So, police can search for and seize looted treasures everywhere, except in Balmoral or Sandringham.

Prince Charles has also been able to use the secretive procedure to vet acts which have resulted in stopping tenants on his estates in Cornwall, Scilly and Somerset buying their homes from him. Changes to law in England allowed leaseholders to buy their properties after a set number of years.

However, Charles’s estates were given special exemption.

No abolition

QUEEN’S consent seems to have begun in the 18th century. It’s a convention rather than a law, a matter of parliamentary procedure, according to Erskine May, the bible of parliamentary procedure. In 2014, a parliamentary committee mulled the abolition of it but stopped short, saying that they had seen “no evidence to suggest that legislation is ever altered”.

Thomas Adams, a specialist in constitutional law at Oxford University, disagrees. He says it gives the Queen and Charles “the kind of influence over legislation that lobbyists would only dream of”.

And because it’s a convention it could be easily abolished by both parliaments, and it wouldn’t need legislation if they decided to do it. But they haven’t.

So, we remain subjects, not citizens. And while consent remains convention, the Queen and Charles can continue to act secretly and without democratic accountability.

On Friday, a parliamentary petition had just 98 signatures of the 10,000 required to trigger a debate.

Don’t expect any change soon.