THE story about Scotland wanting to cut the Sovereign Grant, which funds the upkeep of Buck House and pays for its oddly dressed flunkies, promoted chokes of outrage in all the right places. As manufactured stories go, however, it was badly in need of a villain. Perhaps I can take that as my cue.

Personally I found it disappointing that the Scottish Government was so quick to downplay the idea that the royal household might be asked to make do with a little less. It’s certainly true that the devolution of the Crown Estate (if it ever does properly take place) will not result in a direct cut to the grant. But this should have been an opportunity to publicly question why so much public money is lavished on one of the wealthiest families in the UK.

Of course there was some debate during the referendum, with many Yes voters arguing that Scotland would be well placed to create a modern and less costly head of state. However that aspect didn’t penetrate much into the wider UK media, and the current context offers a better chance to raise these issues. Partly that’s about the louder voice the Scottish Government now enjoys, due to the debate on devolution and the Westminster election results. But it’s also clear that many in the UK Government who saw the Sovereign Grant Act as a better way forward than the old Civil List are now regretting their actions. The revenues from public property managed by the Crown Estate have increased, due to things like wind energy, London property prices and lucrative retail developments such as Fort Kinnaird in Edinburgh. The Windsors are in for a windfall, unless the formula which funds them is reconsidered.

Can there be a more important time, when the pressure on public services and wage inequality is so great? Councils north and south of the border are already reeling from huge funding cuts, and are in line for even more savage ones to come. It’s leaving public sector employees insecure about their jobs and under huge pressure to get their work done with fewer and fewer resources. At the same time, the Government is patting itself on the back over employment levels, ignoring the fact that huge numbers of people are being exploited in low-paid and stressful jobs which leave them still dependent on the welfare system.

That welfare system itself is in line for another £12 billion of cuts, pushing ever more people deeper into poverty. With a crisis of inequality, are we really unwilling to question whether the royals need to be featherbedded quite so much?

Other European countries do this so much better. Elected heads of state are the most affordable of course, as our neighbours Ireland show; theirs comes in at £2 million a year. But even among those countries which still have monarchies, most spend between £10m and £15m a year to keep them. Once you count up all the taxpayer funding of the royals, the campaign group Republic has shown that the UK spends far more than the headline figure – hundreds of millions of pounds.

Of course, the Crown Estate story, as well as missing the chance to seriously question this absurd waste of money, distracted from the deeper issues of ownership in Scotland.

A large part of the reason why so many want the Crown Estate to be devolved is a sense that the public assets it manages are not being put to the best use in the interests of the public, on whose behalf they are owned. This relates to the land reform agenda which has returned to the Scottish Parliament and which provokes the same splutters of outrage in all the same places. Families which enjoy longstanding privilege and show a deep sense of entitlement find it intolerable that a community ought to own its land, or that people in Scotland expect landowning businesses to pay their fair share of tax.

At a time when the UK Chancellor is being pressured to offer yet another tax giveaway to the UK’s top earners, and when millions of people rely on the welfare state to protect them from the poverty which results from such an unequal society, the question of distribution of wealth is an urgent one.

There a strong body of evidence that wealth inequality, even more than income inequality, is bad for our economy. It is certainly bad for our society, and undermines the sense of solidarity that a humane and decent society depends upon. The examples of the royal family and the Crown Estate may only be emblematic, but they should be taken as opportunities to make the case for the fairer society which so many politicians mention in their soundbites, but in practice do little to bring abo