George Windsor’s Kindness, a System’s Contradiction
When George Mountbatten-Windsor was photographed helping to serve meals at a homeless centre, the images landed softly and reassuringly. A child lending a hand, learning empathy, meeting people where they are—there is nothing objectionable in that. Volunteering is noble, and teaching children to care about others is a good thing, full stop. But the warmth of those images sits uneasily alongside the realities of the institution they represent.
12/21/20252 min read
This is not a criticism of a child. Children are innocent and not to blame for their family's greed. Nor is it a swipe at volunteering itself. The discomfort lies with the system—and with the adults who curate moments like this—most notably William and Kate —within the wider machinery of the British royal family.
The British monarchy costs the public more than £500 million a year when security, estates, and public funding are taken into account. It controls vast property holdings, including palaces with hundreds of rooms that sit empty or underused. At the same time, the institution has been criticised for charging rent or fees to charities—among them the RNLI, a volunteer-run lifesaving service that relies on public donations to pull people from the sea.
Against that backdrop, a carefully photographed hour of service by a royal child begins to look less like humility and more like performance.
This is the core tension: homelessness in Britain is not a problem of insufficient compassion. It is a problem of resources, housing policy, and political will. When an institution that sits atop extraordinary wealth offers symbolic gestures rather than structural solutions—giving back our land, waiving rents, or paying the same taxes as the rest of us —those gestures risk becoming a kind of moral window-dressing.
Royal volunteering visits are often framed as “raising awareness.” But awareness of homelessness is not lacking among those sleeping rough, queuing at food banks, or watching councils declare bankruptcy. What is lacking is access—to housing, to stability, to money already locked away behind big gates and meaningless titles.
For a child like George, the day may well have been sincere and educational. That should be acknowledged. Children learn by example, and kindness is never wasted. Yet the example set by the system around him is more ambiguous: a lesson in how charity can be staged while inequality remains untouched.
If the monarchy wishes to demonstrate genuine leadership on social issues, it must go beyond the optics of volunteering. It must confront its own contradictions—its wealth amid scarcity, its empty rooms amid homelessness, its charges to charities amid calls for public generosity.
Until then, images of royal children serving meals will continue to provoke a double reaction: admiration for the act itself, and frustration that such small gestures are offered by an institution uniquely positioned to do so much more.
Children like George should be allowed to learn empathy without being turned into evidence that the system is humane. If the monarchy genuinely values service, it should protect royal children from becoming tools of performative charity—and leave them free, as adults, to decide whether they wish to uphold or walk away from the toxic institution entirely.