Why it is time to ask overseas vacationers to pay to make use of our wonderful museums – not well-off Brits as Tracey Emin claims: LIBBY PURVES

Tracey Emin‘s work may not all be to your taste but salute her: a trouper, a missionary, an impassioned defender of the power of art and museums to refresh us.

From a rough childhood, and now serious illness, she knows the hunger and thrill of having your spirit fed by brand-new works of art and fascinating objects that link us to ancient humans.

So it was worth respecting when the former ‘YBA’ rebel opened her own lifetime exhibition at Tate Modern and told wealthy and successful people to ‘tap and make a donation’ every time they visit our free museums and galleries, and subscribe to memberships even of those they don’t go to: ‘The longer it stays free, the better it is for everybody.’

It’s a good time to speak for that freedom, because the National Gallery – with a deficit of £8.2million – is not alone in facing stark economic concerns, and Britain’s free-for-entry policy costs about £480million a year.

At a time of anxious scraping and cutting, it could be an easy target.

The Treasury looked at ending it in November last year and backed off, but only last month in the House of Lords, Baroness Twycross said: ‘We remain proud of the landmark Labour policy, which means that everyone is able to enter our national museums free of charge.’

Just about all senior national museum and gallery figures want to hold firm, seeing free entry as a proud and confident policy of a great nation.

But what the fiery Emin’s plea to shake down the rich didn’t touch on is the question of whether international tourists – often pretty well-heeled and free-spending – should also get in without paying.

We pay through taxation, but our visitors don’t even suffer a formal ‘tourist tax’ upon visiting Britain.

Could we not keep entry free for all of us – old, young, poor, rich, educated or just curious – but charge foreigners a modest fee?

The museum establishment, and the independent Cultural Policy Unit, oppose this.

Sharon Heal, of the Museums Association, says it would cause ‘reputational damage for the UK’ and affect retail and hospitality.

Others say it would be complicated and expensive to man the doorways (though heaven knows, there are already queues for bag checks at the big institutions).

Neil MacGregor, former British Museum leader, makes the point that at the BM at least we hold so many world treasures that justification to keep them depends on the sense that we hold them safe for that world to visit.

But it seems to me, with a little regret, that we now should rethink our unusual generosity of access to all travelling humankind if we are to keep it for our own citizens, and stop the vulturous Treasury from one day clawing back the millions it costs.

Free entry is not set in stone; before 2001 you paid £9 to visit the Natural History Museum for example, unless you were a school party or otherwise exempt – that was until Gordon Brown, as Chancellor, offered a VAT sweetener to free museums.

I remember the arguments about ‘going free’ because I was a trustee of the National Maritime Museum (now part of Royal Museums Greenwich).

Enthusiasts for free admission said that you could save by not having a manned cash desk.

Opponents thought it crazy, even if it did boost visitors (which it did), and maintenance costs would go up with increased footfall.

One argument was that offering free entry to the entire world was not only a bit reckless, but unusual.

You won’t get into the Louvre in Paris without paying over 20 quid, and most of Europe’s museums and galleries such as Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum and Madrid’s Prado charge non-EU citizens.

In the US, the Smithsonian and the Getty are free, but not the great Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art.

If British visitors want to gasp at Chinese terracotta warriors, Beijing’s Forbidden City, or most Tokyo collections including the Nintendo Museum, we have to pay.

So, honestly, for us to charge foreign museum and gallery visitors can’t really be reasonably seen as desperate ‘reputational damage’.

I doubt it features much at all in anybody’s UK-bound holiday plans.

Unless, of course, it was made prohibitively expensive.

Certainly, part of the argument has always been that the administrative cost of distinguishing between locals and foreigners would mean complex queueing, therefore hiking up the prices to stupid levels.

Others cry: ‘We don’t have national ID cards – would we Brits have to carry our passports everywhere, just in case we might want to wander into the National Portrait Gallery?’

I’m not so sure.

Digital technology has roared ahead since those arguments in 2001: everyone carries two or three cards or a phone.

Perhaps entry could be free for children of all nations, but remember that when any British kid reaches 16 they get a National Insurance number.

Make that a culture-card: free museum entry for life. Visitors could buy digital entry – perhaps before arriving in the UK, or on site from a machine.

The Cultural Policy Unit continues to insist that ‘discriminatory admission fees would be difficult to implement without national identity cards, and would come with significant capital costs’ but, with respect, it feels a bit lazy not to investigate further.

My fear is that in refusing to consider an income stream from global visitors we will, in the end, lose the original rather wonderful policy of making the great national museums and galleries free for us who support them.

Let anyone – child, teen or adult, whether learned or ignorant – freely step away from the cramped phone-screen world into places full of real, inspiring objects and images.

Whether your soul is best fed by the great Kensington treasure houses, the adventurous weirdness of Tate Modern or the National Football Museum, there’s something for you.

Walk into tremendous buildings, see tremendous things or tiny oddities.

Stare into the eyes of portraits, understand long-dead civilisations, blink in awe at the blue whale skeleton, lose yourself in art or craftsmanship.

Be inspired. Or just boggle and shake your head at stuff that doesn’t do it.

It’s a world in there, and free.

But it costs to maintain, heat and staff it, and, perhaps more importantly, to support the careers of the young who work there.

And someone has to help us pay.