Brexit is shrinking crowds at Britain’s biggest art galleries
This paper from iNews in the UK has proved that visitor numbers to UK galleries have collapsed 20-50 percent compared to 2019 while art galleries in the European Union have seen no such decline.
All of this is from Brexit. Brexit has been devastating to the United Kingdom, as I have talked about repeatedly here. But one thing Brexit has not done is implement visas to the UK for EU and US visitors. Democracies did not need an ETA to travel to the United Kingdom until 8 January 2025, up to that date anyone with a democratic non-EU passport could travel to the United Kingdom and just show up. But starting 3 days ago this visa has been extended to European Union nationals.
Not only that, but the UK and EU have scrapped visa-free travel with the implementation of eVisas for most third party nationals. This puts an unnecessary burden on tourists from safe countries, incentivizing them to stay home or travel to other countries over yours.
Just leaving the European Union was enough to see tourism to the UK crash. Now they are going even further and implementing unnecessary paperwork and taxes on tourists. Tourists have already shown that leaving the EU was enough to convince them to not travel to the United Kingdom. Now that they have to pay for a visa their incentive to travel to the UK is going to be even lower, so you should expect even fewer tourists visiting the United Kingdom, draining money from small towns across the country, taking money from mom and pop hotels. There is no reason for this madness.
The proof is becoming clearer everyday. Whether it is Starmer’s rantings about Eurocrats, Biden’s hesitating to help Ukrainians as their children are killed or kidnapped by Russians, Stephen Harper implementing visas on NATO allies, or Trump’s radical spreading of taxes to every country except Belarus, Russia and North Korea, we have been seeing the Anglosphere falling down the wrong path for 25 years now.
When we finally get a president or a prime minister who is actually decent they are overwhelmed by other issues they need to fix before voters focus on the price of eggs, “wokeness” or some other nonsense which means they don’t get down to these tourist taxes being implemented by the far-right.
The European Union is not immune to this either. They are following in George Bush’s footsteps in implementing their own visas this year with ETIAS. But we have already seen through Brexit the impact such a system will have. If Brexit is enough to reduce tourism without implementing any sort of tourist visa, the ETIAS is going to be devastating to the European Union. There is no reason to go through with it. I hope politicians in the European Union will see the evidence soon before they go on this perilous economic death march like the Anglosphere has done.
Do not follow our lead. You will regret it. Resist Trumpism.
The United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand need to reverse course and implement visa-free travel. There is no reason to keep our current self-harming tourist tariffs. I don’t care how much it costs, it should not exist. Terrorism between democracies is not a problem. We should spend our resources targeting real threats, not socks and sandals.
The verdict is out, just leaving a free trade bloc is enough to significantly harm tourism, draining revenues from important cultural institutions. Canadians are rightfully refusing to travel to the United States under our current regime. Europeans are avoiding the United Kingdom.
Visas make the situation significantly worse. This must be reversed and in order to protect the freedom and wealth of nations, we need to abolish visas between democracies and re-implement visa-free travel between democracies.