Why should museums be exempt? We must pay

This is a formidable and encouraging rise since the abolition of admission charges in 2001.

The National Maritime Museum claims an increase of 197 per cent, the Natural History Museum 159 per cent, and the Museums of Liverpool 178 per cent. Our response should be "Whoopee!" and all who fought for free admission when many Labour politicians damned art galleries as elitist should be in a mood of euphoric self-congratulation.

I was passionately one of them, but am no longer, for I cannot see why museum visitors should be exempt from the uncomfortable changes we now face in other aspects of our lives. Why should we not pay for admission, at least for the lifetime of this government?

I do not accept the argument that any benefit will be wiped out by the cost of electronic equipment and the appointment of administrative staff. Charging should involve only the installation of mechanical turnstiles which, with the insertion of a £1 coin in the slot, will admit one visitor, old, young, able or infirm. The only administration then required is the counting of coins and the occasional squirt of WD40 if any turnstile groans.

Think of it: 42 million visitors means £42 million, almost enough to buy a major Titian every year and probably enough to fund a major annual exhibition in every institution. What is £1? — a bottle of water, perhaps a cup of tea, but certainly not a cup of coffee. How much of a seat at a football match will it buy, how much of a seat at the Olympics?

It is now a sum so small that even a pre-pubertal child can afford to give it to a beggar. Yet for £1 we all could see the Elgin Marbles, every aspect and artefact of the Italian Renaissance or the empty-headed rubbish of the millionaire artists of today.

Turnstiles would also tell us the simple truth about visitor numbers. I do not believe the published figures. I question the accuracy of electronic counters as much as the accuracy of clickers clicked by guardians at the door. Who or what could possibly count the crowds constantly mobbing the great portico of the British Museum?
The National Gallery has five entrances, one through the café, another always overwhelmed by school parties — and they count with clickers?

Tate Modern's café is too full of local workers who treat it as a canteen, and these are electronically counted as visitors to the Gallery. The only reliable figures are ticket sales for exhibitions but even these are falsified by the estimated addition of perhaps 100,000 Friends and the friends accompanying them.

The figures are concocted for political argument; they "prove" that more people visit museums than football matches — ergo museums must be more cosseted and subsidised. But to a wildly misleading measure they are figments of each institution's fervid imagination.

We should ignore them, install turnstiles and demand £1.