SPECTATOR'S NOTEBOOK

J. W. M. THOMPSON

Mr Stewart's pious expression of hope that British tourists will avoid Spain this summer won't achieve very much. Most of them have already made their arrange- ments, and it will take more than this to make them change them. On the other hand the Foreign Secretary is surely right to rule out reprisals against Spanish workers in this country. This would simply mean punishing the innocent for the sins of a political leader whom many of them would probably like to get rid of anyway.

But what about a special impost on British tourists to Spain this summer? They have, fortunately, to obtain visas in order to enter Spain, and it would therefore be an easy matter for the British customs to identify those who were leaving for holi- days in Spain. If such tourists were required to pay £10 per head for an exit visa, without which their passports would not be valid for Spain, then many of them might indeed think twice. If the Government is serious in its protestations of support for the people of Gibraltar, this is where it should look. And we have to find the money for helping Gibraltar somewhere.

Progress report

From time to time Mr Anthony Lewis, the New York Times's distinguished London correspondent, supplies his readers with crisp little essays on the mood of the British people. I try not to miss them, partly because Mr Lewis seems to find us such a mercurial and changeable lot that I can't wait to find out what fresh volte- face the national character has performed since his last diagnosis. There was a famous analysis by him three years ago which defined the atmosphere here as 'almost eerie in its relentless frivolousness'; then another which discovered in us 'a seeming joy in mortification of the national flesh'. And Mr Lewis, I'm glad to see, has been ex- ploring our character again.

Now, it appears, 'for Americans this country seems to have more to admire than ever'. His fellow-countrymen in England express 'delight, wonder, relief at finding themselves again in a country of civility and good nature'. And it's not merely per- sonal kindness or the absence of violence which he has in mind; 'there is a larger sense of life being run on a human scale, in the interest of human individuals'.

All of which is thoroughly gratifying, I'm sure. And yet a nation which veers so dramatically between stark decadence and the ancient virtues of decency and quiet may well have so gigantic a streak of in- stability within it as to be, in fact, off its collective rocker. I wonder if that will be Mr Lewis's next, and most alarming, dis- covery about us?

Bigger and better?

But I quote Mr Lewis not to tease (or only partly) but also because he makes an inter- esting point which is particularly apposite this week. He writes of the prevailing American feeling that in the United States everything has got too large, so that the individual feels helpless; that Mr Justice Brandeis was right, and the liberal realists who later scoffed at him wrong, when he spoke of the Curse of Bigness. In little England, of course. Bigness is at the moment a fashionable aspiration, partic- ularly in administration. The Redcliffe- Maud report is founded upon the notion that bigger authorities will be better than the existing untidy assortment of small and medium-sized units. As so often, we may be following America's example without troubling to learn from her mistakes.

However, we have another civilised amenity which Americans may also envy. Whatever the efficiency merchants in the Tory and Labour parties hanker after, it's likely to be a long, long time before they can push the earnest Redcliffe-Maud through the eye of the parliamentary needle.

Playing the game

The moral muddle we are in over trading with immoral regimes abroad was never better illustrated than in the Daily Tele- graph's report that the £33,000,000 poly- ester fibre plant which a British consortium is erecting in Russia is being built by 'convict' labour. The details—the barbed wire, the electrified fence, the watch tower manned by troops with machine guns— made the blood run cold. Of all ghastly products of the twentieth century's night- mares, the slave state as perfected in Ger- many and Russia is the most appalling: and here we are, in the week when D Day is being commemorated, informed that a British industrial enterprise is, even if quite unintentionally, engaged in large scale co- operation with the most odious slave- masters of them all. It is profoundly naus- eating. But we won't play cricket with South Africans: oh dear no.

Perhaps we had better be thoroughly realistic and take this affair as a model. Why not rebuild all our industries in Russia? There's an endless supply of 'convicts' to do the work, no fear of strikes, no need for In Place of Strife; our own trade unions could devote themselves to ritualistic or ceremonial concerns; profits would flow uninterruptedly; and all we would have to do would be to try to forget that George Orwell ever wrote that prophetic book, Animal Farm.

The light that failed

It's rather comical that the Government, while seeming to risk its very existence in the abstract battle against industrial strife, appears both silent and helpless before the dispute on its own doorstep. The Stationery Office is hamstrung by labour troubles which drag on from week to week. All sorts of official reports and statistics are unavailable. You can't even buy such key documents of our time as the Prices and Incomes Board's report on the pay and duties of lighthouse-keepers. I'm surprised Mr Wilson hasn't sent in the Army. What becomes of purposive government if the voice of Mr Aubrey Jones is thus muffled?

I feel particularly strongly about the lighthouse men. There is something romantic and special about their work, although since there are only 436 of them it might have been thought possible to cope with their problems without invoking Mr Jones's tireless bureaucracy. I hope that in making necessary improvements the Board of Trade will not destroy the satisfying

idea (see Virginia Woolf's To the Light- house) of a remote and dedicated service working on almost the last frontier we have left.

A modest suggestion may he in order here. Years ago John Betjeman said that the perfect bread-and-butter job for a poet was that of railway stationmaster on some sleepy branch line. Now that such blissful retreats no longer exist, why not Arts Council awards of a year or two's service in some isolated lighthouse? Security, free- dom from distraction, close contact with nature poets and writers could profit handsomely from all these. At the worst, it would infuse new life into that line flower of folk art, 'She was only a light- house-keeper's daughter .

Protest

I don't like the Concorde commemorative stamps. In particular I dislike the wording, which reads in one corner '9d. (it:NMI:MAW and in another 'Concorde HARRISON'. The intrusive names. I take it, are those of designer and printer respectively. But the much more handsome ordinary stamps are not thus disfigured. Why does the Post Office, which grows faint at the mere thought of commercial radio, turn these special stamps into vulgar hoardings?