New Year’s Eve and Boris Johnson’s Decision to Charge to See London’s Fireworks

For many people, watching the New Year’s Eve fireworks in London is a tradition that they look forward too throughout the year. For years, this has been a free event that British people take pride in. Despite the crowds, many people travel to London from all over the United Kingdom at this time of year to watch the fireworks light up the sky over the River Thames. However, this tradition is coming to a close as Major of London Boris Johnson has introduced a new scheme.

The New Year’s Eve fireworks display was established back in 2003 and has been attracting increasingly large crowds of people each year. This year, the fireworks display will not be free. The Greater London Authority has issued a total of 100,000 tickets for the fireworks display, which are being sold for £10. However, the event was attended by around half a million people last year, which means that even people who are willing to pay £10 for a ticket may well have to miss out.

One of the issues regarding the sale of tickets is that online ticket touts are scooping up large numbers of tickets and selling them for as much as £500 each. This puts the cost of the tickets outside the budget of the average person. Attempts have been made to restrict the number of tickets that a person can purchase, but monitoring and enforcing this is proving to be extremely difficult.

In defence of the move to sell tickets, Boris Johnson announced that it was intended to reduce the crowds and make sure that people who did attend the display would be able to get a good view. He pointed out that the cost of £10 per ticket was minimal and would hardly cover the cost of the event, stating that this is not a money making scheme. He also went on to say that the display would be fully televised as usual, which would allow people who did not have tickets to watch the display from virtually anywhere in the world.

However, for many commentators the issue is not the cost of the tickets but the fact that a form of entertainment that was formerly free is no longer so. Many people see the New Year’s Eve fireworks as an important tradition and that it has been added to the increasingly growing list of traditions that have been scrapped in recent years.

One of the main issues regarding the fireworks display seems to be security. It is almost impossible to control around half a million people on New Year’s Eve, especially since most of them will have been drinking and in the party mood. If the event is free, it is difficult to enforce rules and regulations that would allow the organisers to remove trouble makers. A number of organisations have stepped in and offered their services this year to help things run smoothly but the task of crowd control on this night of the year is almost overwhelming.

Of course, it is simply impossible to please everyone. Perhaps one solution would have been to have a special area with the best views where tickets could be sold for as much as people were willing to pay, while other areas were free to a restricted number of people. However, with the increasing number of people who wish to attend the event, deciding who was allowed to attend for free and who was turned away might also prove to cause a lot of conflict. This seems to be yet another situation where the Mayor faces conflict no matter what he chooses to do.