George Osborne is right to give the Elgin Marbles away

The J'accuse view

I am a child of Blair and so, like the rest of us, I have no memory of what London was like before his reign of terror began. I know only the Britain he destroyed; the decaying, crime infested, paranoid second world country that my unfortunate accident of birth condemns me to.

New Labour’s assault on museums is a classic of the genre, with ignorance and idealism in ample supply. Thinking that making museums free would inculcate career criminals in the making, those we condem to inner-city comprehensives, with a burning passion for archaeology and natural sciences, that the stabbiest in our society would hop on the 59 to study the Rosetta stone or gaze upon Lambert; it is a way of seeing the world that can only be understood from the winding lanes of Hampstead Garden Suburb.

There was some resigned reporting ten years on that the free museums were being used mostly by the middle classes. This rather misses the point; although of course it was unjust that the working man was being taxed to fund day trips for the well-heeled who could well afford it. The bigger crime was that the removal of the price mechanism for entry had deluged the Museums with a completely unsustainable flood of tourists, who not only paid nothing, depriving the country of useful money, but made the experience miserable through congestion. Between 2001 (when museums opened up) and 2010 the number of people visiting DCMS funded Museums in Britain increased by 41%.

When I heard reports that George Osborne was pushing for the Elgin Marbles to be sent back to Greece I decided to hop on the Tube to Russel Square to see them for myself. The British Museum, from the outside, is an arresting building but first you must navigate the motley assortment of semi-criminal misery enhancers who now infest the streets of London. The unlicensed hot chestnut sellers, the cup game scammers, the menacing men riding their electric motorbikes on the pavement. It’s the London of Children of Men without the catharsis of an extremist government. One where the elite do not even manage to preserve St James’s Park. Westmacott’s peerless masterpiece is obscured by a winding queue of tourists doing what tourists in London do; either screaming in to their mobile phones or playing tinny music out of them.