Steve, where is it "generally settled" that the cost of security was £30m? The information I got were from the BBC News page I linked to in my post. That says the police were not releasing the figures for security reasons. Have some authoritative figures now been published? Otherwise most of what I've seen seems to be guesswork by journalists.

I was not "singling out" football, only giving it as an example of other policing costs which happened to be at a similar level to the security for the previous royal wedding. You are quite right that the police have to cover all sorts of events from which individual taxpayers may not benefit, and I agree with your comments entirely. My point was that it seems to be only events like royal weddings where people seem to make an issue of the cost.

I take your point about the Crown Estate. However it seems truer to say that the Norman aristocracy seized the land from the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy. The ordinary people before the Conquest seem mostly to have held land under conditions of service, just as they did later under the Norman feudal system. You'd probably have to go back many more centuries to find that 'ordinary people' had owned the land themselves. Be that as it may, we live in the world as we find it, and the fact is that the Crown Estate income effectively more than covers the cost of maintaining the head of state, even the extended one we have in Britain. That seems good value to me. There may be many reasons to argue against a monarchy but I don't think the cost is one of them.