All those local workers (and hopefully the businesses too) who make a living from tourism, pay most of their tax at a national level. The NRM, the Manchester and Bradford museums are national treasures, they benefit the UK as well as the local economy, the solution needs to be a national one.
Quite.
I did say that I was playing Devil's advocate, and also put forward some alternative solutions.
Much as I think that a variety of free museums are vital to any nation's healthy development, these are our elected leaders (however flawed and imperfect that election process may be), and are doing what everyone knew they would. In these circumstances, if we wish to keep things going, then hands may need (somewhere) to be put in pockets to pay for things other than via taxation: a successful petition would mean that the money has to come out of someone else's budget.
Suggestions for which budgets are going to be cut to make way for free-entry to museums are welcome. What we really need is a proper informed national debate about what we want, how much it would all cost, and whether we (as a nation) wish to pay for it, how we wish to pay for it, and how much we are prepared to pay. What we get is ill-informed cant and blind application of ideas without full consideration of the context of those ideas: Adam Smith envisaged capitalism operating in terms of enlightened long-term self-interest within a Christian moral framework (i.e. it is in everyone's interest to make sure that absolute poverty does not exist, and that people are not exploited) rather than the ideas that the "market knows best" and operates outside of morality. The "market" cannot know anything - it is inanimate.
BTW, this isn't politics, but macro-economics. Personally, I am of the Keynesian persuasion and fully prepared to pay more taxes for better services (provided I know what they are, and spending is not wasted on yet more "management consultants"), which makes me feel somewhat disenfranchised with the electoral choices we are offered at the moment - combine that with tribal voting and the promotion of pointless xenophobia in many of the newspapers, and it's all quite depressing. What I need is a hobby to get me away from all this!
