Imagine scientists are performing an experiment on resource hoarding in mice. They give a surplus of food to one set of mice and very little food to the others. Perhaps they keep the offspring of the wealthy mice separate, giving the poorer mice less and less, then after a few generations they reintroduce the two sets.

What if, hypothetically, upon seeing the others starving and unable to feed their offspring or themselves, the wealthy mice immediately became more guarded and started hoarding increasing amounts of food within sight of the others.

Imagine if, despite the fact that there was enough food to comfortably feed everyone, the ones who started with more made the choice to hoard the resources to the detriment of the others. The experiment would demonstrate a worrying lack of empathy and would probably be used to highlight a discrepancy between the compassionate nature of humanity, and the selfishness of animals.

In reality that experiment might go a completely different way. Mice are actually quite empathetic creatures who have been shown to respond to the pain and fear of other mice, but it's interesting how resource hoarding sounds significantly more cruel and evil when we take away the structures, titles and celebrity which normalise and justify it within our society.

Oscar Wilde once said of charity that it “is not a solution [to poverty]: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.” This rings out in my head like the tolling of some monotonous perpetual bell whenever I see glossy, curated footage of celebrities engaging in charitable pursuits, seemingly unable to anticipate anything other than fawning gratitude from their audience.

Make no mistake, though they are certainly not the only people hoarding resources. The royal family are no different to any other pop culture family built on generational wealth and nepotism. They are praised as “thrifty” for wearing extortionately priced items of clothing more than once, called “down-to-earth” for taking selfies, all the while hoarding more resources than any family could use across multiple lifetimes.

Recently, Catherine has been quoted as saying of the essential services provided by baby banks, "We need to be able to normalise this,” which has been criticised by anti-poverty campaigners who affirm that there should never be anything normal about poverty, or the services helping to mitigate it.

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We should never look at an unequal society within which devastating poverty and extreme affluence are allowed to co-exist as anything other than a structural, governmental and societal failure which demands our immediate attention to resolve.

Bringing awareness to something and normalising it are two different things: we should all be aware that food banks across this country have seen a dramatic increase in clients accessing their help, but we should never look at this as normal; this is the grotesque and inevitable consequence of resource hoarding and governmental apathy.

It is nothing short of a disgrace that issues such as homelessness and the increasing need for food banks exist, that there are ever more people in this country who cannot afford to fulfil their basic needs. Headlines like “Prince William poses in his red cap selling the Big Issue magazine with pal Dave for the third time in a year after vowing to end homelessness once and for all” truly does put the PR into problem.

It's easy to make noble statements, while dressing up and doing photoshoots and interviews with people whose lives they could change with less cash than they've probably lost down the back of the couch, but it's quite another for celebrities to identify and address their participation in the root causes of an unequal society, and the ways in which wealth hoarding and economic imbalance perpetuate and exacerbate the cycle of poverty.

Let's play a game called who wants to remain a billionaire. The charity Crisis reports that it would cost approximately £1.9billion to completely eradicate homelessness throughout the UK. On a completely unrelated note, Forbes estimates that the royal family have a net worth of £21.3billion. In one year alone, the UK government spent £1.7billion on temporary accommodation for people experiencing homelessness.

It is literally costing us more as a country to mitigate the effects of homelessness than it would to eradicate it. We are putting the world's most expensive plaster on a wound which will continue to rip itself open without the appropriate stitching.

It has always seemed the height of irony to see members of the royal family posing with people experiencing long-term homelessness, only to be bundled into one of their many vehicles, and taken safely back to any one of their numerous properties funded in part by the taxpayer.

I'm not an expert in managing an incalculable fortune, but if one is in possession of both astronomic wealth, and a burning desire to solve a specific problem well within the budget, perhaps one might like to distribute as much of that wealth as possible to those one wishes to help.

It's unclear who is making the PR decisions on behalf of the family, but it is evident that as with most extremely wealthy people, the goal is to make them seem as generous and down-to-earth as possible, often putting their children front and centre at photo shoots and press releases.

I very much do not agree with bringing children into the photoshoots and carefully curated PR opportunities, as it opens them up to an audience unable to differentiate between the calculating actions of responsible adults, and children who potentially lack a full awareness and understanding of their situation.

Celebrity is losing its sparkle, it's no longer quite as fun to watch grinning faces illuminated by the warm glow of opulence. The issue is not that the most wealthy people in our society are bringing attention to worthy causes, or that they are using their platform to help people, the issue is that the very existence of a monarchy which hoards vast amounts of wealth, land and resources represents active participation in the kind of structural inequality that necessitates the work of the charities they support.

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To effect genuine, sustainable, long-term change when it comes to people who are being continually failed by structural inequality, put the cameras away, stop posing repeatedly with people experiencing long-term homelessness, and use more of the excessive hereditary fortune to redress the balance. When the cameras stop flashing and the interviews are concluded, the people featured in the press will still be experiencing homelessness, as will thousands of other people whose faces we might never see.

Poverty and structural inequality prevail, while the grotesquely wealthy head home, PR opportunity secured and conscience appeased till the next time.