Swiss rollback
Sir: Caroline Sinclair's piece on Switzer- land is apt to give imbalance a bad name. While I do not for a moment doubt the authenticity of her private examples — they have the ring of truth about them — I cannot quite agree with all of what she presents as official facts. Voting is only carried out by a public show of hands in small communes, and in a small number of small cantons which have retained the
LETTERS
traditional form of the annual diet. What Sinclair terms 'no right to strike on econo- mic grounds' is the result of an industrial peace treaty hammered out by trade un- ions and employers in 1937. I have never felt dominated by the less than cuddly chemical and pharamaceutical multination- als (but then, I have never lived in Basle). Promotion anywhere used to be dependent on progression in the army in many places; in the last 20 years or so, this has been increasingly less so. Swiss officers (and other ranks) have not been on 'active service' since the second world war, and even then that service was not particularly active. That over 20 per cent of Swiss males are of legally unsound mind is news to me; but then I never trust statistics in any case — unless I've doctored them myself, that is.
Switzerland is often presented in far too idyllic and stereotyped terms: as the 'land of chocolate and cuckoo clocks' (although the latter are only on sale for the benefit of gullible tourists who don't know that the clocks come from Germany's Black Forest) with some yodelling and the Matterhorn thrown in for good measure. When anti- dotes are published, they tend to be horrific and stereotyped; the gnomes of Zurich being a case in point.
The truth is somewhere in between. It is easy to idealise a country; it is just as easy to paint it in the starkest colours. There are political, industrial, legal, social, military and sundry other malpractices everywhere, and even the snivelling little git who takes pleasure in informing on you is not peculiar to Switzerland. The latest case I have come across was that of a loving neighbour who provided the local authorities with unsoli- cited information on a point which did not, ultimately, require planning permission, after all. The neighbour was ours; the whole to-do set us back £130; the location was England.
Does Sinclair simply abominate Switzer- land, or is her view so jaundiced as to be beyond redemption?
Tony Hafliger
CH-910S Schonengrund, Alte Drogerie, Postfach, Switzerland
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