It’s the cultural gift that keeps on giving. Visitors to our national museums and galleries can enter, walk through grand halls, view paintings, sculpture, relics and artefacts, and they can do so free of charge.
It never ceases to amaze me, this unifying act which sees hundreds of institutions encouraging us to engage with and learn from the stories laid out across walls, in glass cases, suspended from ceilings, in drawers and behind velvet ropes. We ought to view it as a symbol of the magnanimity of this country, a cornerstone of our democracy. Perhaps in the same way that an individual can stand on a soap box at Hyde Park’s Speakers Corner, so can every man, woman and child access our museums at no cost.
Except, of course, it’s not just British citizens who can benefit from this. Everyone, every tourist who visits our great cities, can waltz into many of our great exhibitions without paying a penny. What’s curious is that we never seem to blink an eye at this generosity. Perhaps, as with the NHS, we have become blinded to the cost, because the politicians and the bureaucrats are so fond of reminding us that they are “free”.
But as visitors head for the wide open gates of our palaces of culture, they may find themselves sidestepping a pothole, or glancing upwards to check they won’t be hit by a loose tile. Because, as with so many of our institutions, and the roads that lead to them, they are crumbling. And who picks up the tab? The British taxpayer, of course.
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport annually spends around £8.5 billion, of which £684 million is spent on museums and galleries. Maybe, as a former boss of the British Museum suggested at the weekend, it’s time for tourists to put their hands in their pockets. Sir Mark Jones talked of leaks in galleries that occurred during heavy rainstorms and admitted that “some of the buildings are in a poor state”. He wondered if funding could “come in from charging overseas visitors”. To which I’d say, “Hell yeah”.
Free admission was made universal by New Labour. But surely Sir Mark is right. After all, when we go abroad we pay €17 (£14.50) to visit the Louvre in Paris, €15 to enter the Museo del Prado in Madrid, €19 for the Uffizi in Florence, $25 (£20) to get into the Museum of Modern Art in New York and so on, across the world.
And we don’t blink, of course. Fair enough to cough up, we reason. Yet we impose double standards – on ourselves. Back in Blighty we usher them in to see our Titians and Bellinis, in a similar manner to our border officials on British beaches. But while we are outwardly polite, many of us are secretly seething.
That resentment is turned up a notch when we visit these places ourselves and seek out the café, where we pay through the nose for a cup of coffee and some lasagne. It’s one of our national sports: getting taxed twice and then being clobbered for the privilege.
It really isn’t too much to demand that tourists make a contribution. After all, they know their own countries have form: we’ve all spotted the “tourist tax” mysteriously added to a hotel bill in Barcelona or that entry cost into Bali
of 150,000 rupiah (£7.25).
Or the way Greek bars up their prices in the evenings (of course the locals don’t pay…).
It makes sense, it’s fair, it’s sensible and, in this week of national hustings, it’s surely a tax we can all agree on.
