You are really appalling with that comparison to slavery McGrath. Really god damned appalling.

How so? I wasn't thinking in terms of the slave system that operated in America, if that's what gigi assumed. There have been a fair number of slave owning societies in which wealthy and powerful slaves were to be found. For example Ancient Athens, Rome, the Ottoman Empire and China. They led very comfortable lives, so long as they did what their masters required - but they weren't free.

True enough, if the royals decided to walk away they aren't going to get their heads chopped off, or get clapped in irons,which would have been the kind of thing those wealthy slaves would have likely to have happen to them. So they aren't technically slaves, and I didn't say they were (that's what "essentially" meant). But sanctions like that are not the only way in which freedom of choice can in practice be reduced to vanishing point, and their freedom is in mnay ways very restricted, as thsi latest episode demonstrates.

But I'm still puzzled by the hate people seem to feel. If people in general didn't really want them, they'd be gone by the end of the week, whether they liked it or not. They've been placed in that situation purely by an accident of birth, nothing to do with anything they did. Why blame them? Surely no one is actually jealous?