Amsterdam’s lazy campaign against British tourists

Amsterdam has launched a campaign telling rowdy Brits to stay away. Men between the age of 18 and 35 are being targeted with videos showing what happens to those who overindulge. Brits who search online for terms like ‘stag do’, ‘cheap Amsterdam accommodation’ and ‘pub crawl Amsterdam’ will be served with the warning adverts featuring tourists being locked up or hospitalised.

To put it in wrestling terms, we’ve well and truly become the ‘heels’ of Europe. Brexit, it seems, has catalysed the unfair ‘bad boy Brit’ persona of a sometimes sluggish, mostly uncultured and drunken nation which urinates and swears its way across the continent while ordering beige grub in slow and shouty English. Amsterdam welcomes 20 million tourists per year and has long been perceived as a haven of sex, drugs and biking – sometimes in that order. But now, it appears, the city’s authorities want to put off Brits. Is this really fair?

The background to the ‘Stay Away’ campaign is that Amsterdam sort of wants to change its reputation, but sort of doesn’t – and young Brits have now found themselves in the middle of these political contortions.

The city’s mayor Femke Halsema, who has been in the post since April 2018, is at the heart of this muddle. Halsema, a former leader of the green left-wing GroenLinks party and the city’s first female mayor, has rightfully warned that some Amsterdammers feel estranged from their own city as the commercialisation of prostitution and soft drugs has created a hedonistic headache.

Many residents are understandably tired of the ugliness and anti-social behaviour. The city’s authorities reacted late last year by launching a ‘Visitor Economy 2035’ plan, a package of measures with the overarching aim of changing Amsterdam’s international reputation. The ‘Stay Away’ campaign – which will initially target British men before being rolled out more widely – is part of this initiative.

But the trouble is that Halsema doesn’t exactly want to get rid of all the vices blighting one of Europe’s most picturesque capitals. Instead, it seems she wants to move the problem elsewhere: when it comes to prostitution, this means an ‘erotic centre’ somewhere outside of Amsterdam’s historic capital. But it’s OK because, to use Halsema’s own word, the new red light district will be ‘chic’.

Halsema is clear that she doesn’t want to ‘criminalise prostitution’. ‘It’s very important women and trans workers can do their work in safe conditions and in accordance to human rights,’ she says. Halsema also wants cannabis to be fully legalised. But where does this sit with the attempt to clean up Amsterdam’s image? It’s hard to know.

In the absence of any clear approach to whether or not the city wants to sort itself out, a spot of Brit bashing seems like a convenient option. But this lazy targeting of Brits is not helpful. It also risks having serious and dangerous consequences for Brits abroad. You only have to look back at what happened last May during the Champions League Final when Liverpool faced off against Real Madrid in Paris. Because of ticketing problems and stewardship issues, thousands of fans found themselves stuck outside of the Stade de France in cramped conditions where the police decided to treat them with a liberal dosing of tear gas and pepper spray. The heavy-handed tactics were initially justified by the French authorities on the basis that Liverpool fans were being disorderly. In short, the suggestion was that the Brits were up to their old tricks again and basically deserved what they got – even if they were, in fact, just innocent football fans.

After a backlash from supporters, journalists and British politicians, Uefa eventually saw sense: in February, it published its investigation into what became known as the ‘Champions League Chaos’. The review admitted that Liverpool and Real Madrid fans could have died, criticised French police and ministers and conceded that Uefa had ‘primary responsibility’ for the failures around the event. The worrying thing is that it look a concerted effort for this horrifying incident to be investigated in the first place. Seemingly, if the French authorities had their way, they could have just blamed the Brits.

Amsterdam’s ‘Stay Away’ campaign plays into the unruly Brit stereotype, effectively making the continent a more dangerous place for sons, brothers and fathers who are continually paying for the sins of the hooliganism of the 1980s – a decade most weren’t even born into.

This latest campaign by the authorities in Amsterdam certainly puts the past comments of the city’s ex-mayor, Eberhard van der Laan, into perspective. Back in 2014, he quoted Liverpool’s famous tune to his then London counterpart Boris Johnson. Talking about Brit tourists, he said:

‘They don’t wear a coat as they slalom through the red light district… they sing ‘You’ll never walk alone’. They are dressed as rabbits or priests and sometimes they are not dressed at all.’

The truth is that most Brits who go to Amsterdam do so to have a good time and manage to stay out of trouble. But this targeting of tourists from the UK seems to ignore this fact – and risks doing more harm than good.