CGP Grey, years ago, made a video called The True Cost of the Royal Family Explained. In this video, he goes over numerous arguments on why the U.K. monarchy (and therefore the monarchy of the Commonwealth Realms) is actually profitable for the country. On the surface, these arguments are good, but they are actually quite flawed and forget to take numerous things into account.

It fails to realise that crown land is not the property of the royal family, it is the property of the crown, which is a different thing and in the hands of the government, and so abolishing the monarchy would make no difference to the money earned from the crown lands. 

It seems to misunderstand how the turning over of the profits from crown land by the monarch is simply a formality, and that the monarch has no real choice in the matter.

It makes erroneous claims about castles in France somehow being less attractive to tourists because they don’t have living monarchs, and castles in the U.K. being more attractive for the same reason, giving no real evidence that the presence of royals has anything to do with tourism figures and conveniently ignoring the well known fact that France is the most visited country in the world overall. The video, when using Americans to prove its point, also forgets that a reason why Americans may choose the U.K. over other countries is simply because the U.K. speaks English much like they do.

The video also seems to ignore that over 1000 bills have been vetted by the royals under “Queen’s Consent”. The Queen directly interferes in policies that may affect her.

This video by Republic https://youtu.be/dmlwynkb3ec and this video by Shaun https://youtu.be/yiE2DLqJB8U both explain why Grey’s video is dodgy. Please watch them to get a good understanding of the reasoning for this petition. 

He has never responded to any criticism of or apologised for this video, and for a man who makes otherwise intelligent and informative content, to leave this video up unchecked and feed misinformation is poor conduct from Grey. 

Therefore the request is that he creates a video explaining, admitting to and correcting the mistakes in his video. It would also be nice if he were to respond to the videos mentioned earlier by Republic and Shaun. 

This should be a priority for Grey, if he wishes to keep his videos factual and accurate.