Never really understood the ‘tourist’ line that is pedalled. Never met anyone from the U.K. who says they’re going to Amsterdam but will be popping down to The Hague to gawp at Huis Ten Bosch Palace. By that logic, is it the pro-monarchists who holiday in Spain and the indifferent who holiday in Portugal?
Agree. Always felt like the tourist line is mostly nonsense that's been peddled so hard for so many years that loads of people just spout it without actually thinking.
Millions of people go and visit Versailles, Schonbrunn, the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, and countless other palaces and castles around Europe. You don't need a royal family for palaces and castles to be popular tourist destinations. People visit those places for their beauty, for the history, and various other reasons.
Yes,
some visit because they like the royals and
some came to the UK for the Royal Wedding and so on. But when you weigh that against the massive amounts of public money these people leech away, is it really some gigantic, argument-winning value? I don't think so, and I have at least looked at some data to back up this view. It's a clever media line though, and it's permeated incredibly well into public consciousness, because it's always the one line you hear repeated over and over again, even by people who are pretty indifferent to the monarchy.
Truth is that it's the big, pretty buildings that actually attract most visitors, not the spoilt, out-of-touch sods living inside them. Not to mention that the vast majority of our most popular touristic destinations have sod all to do with the royals anyway, and if they weren't there, I think you'd still get pretty big crowds hanging around outside Buckingham (or even getting to walk around inside it, which would surely be of MUCH bigger touristic value and would help to generate a lot of jobs for normal people) or visiting Windsor, etc.
To be on topic: I won't be watching the coronation and couldn't care less. (What a surprise, eh? :D)
