Peter Rhodes on tourist taxes, the Iron Dome and the tangled issue of loyalty
Cities all over the world are introducing tourist taxes to get a grip on numbers while making a tidy profit. Trippers to Venice pay five euros (£4.27) entry fee. Why, you may ask, does Britain not do the same? The answer is that for many years, resorts around the British coast have operated schemes to part tourists from large sums of money, while offering virtually nothing in return.
The strange thing about these establishments is that the more the punters give, the more they want to give. We call them amusement arcades.
As the national conversation turns to the possibility of conscription and military service, comments by two of my readers bear repeating.
The first questions the commitment of some communities to defending Britain: “Surely the more diverse our communities become, the more diverse the level of loyalty towards Britain will become.” The other reader recalls the men of his extended family, all of Italian stock, who spoke Italian at home but did not hesitate to volunteer to fight in the British Army in the First World War.
Loyalty is a complex thing. We may assume that today's migrants will never have the sort of patriotism towards Britain that goes with being deep-rooted here. But millions of Commonwealth and Empire citizens helped us defeat Nazism. And on this eve of St George's Day, I wonder how many of today's new arrivals, having fled hell-hole regimes to reach Britain, appreciate liberty in a way that the rest of us never can and would gladly serve in the British armed forces, given the chance.
Meanwhile, having seen the success of Israel's Iron Dome anti-missile system, some pundits are suggesting Britain should develop something similar. Think again. Iron Dome has to defend about 8,500 square miles of Israel while Britain covers about 94,000 square miles. Bang goes the defence budget.
After last week's item on the app to tell you how much Baileys liqueur is left in the bottle, a reader says what we really need is an app to locate the last bit of spread in the Marmite jar. I dare say that in some university research department, the boffins are working on it.
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