No one who travelled in France or Switzerland last summer
can have any illusion about the effect the reduction of the tourist allowance to £25—for the whole year—will have. It must virtually ban Britons from holidays in those countries, and indeed from practically all the Continent, altogether. In Switzerland the adverse exchange, since devaluation in this country, is such that hotel prices, and meal prices, reckoned in sterling were a pretty serious matter even to tourists allowed £100 apiece. Travel charges are as bad. The short funicular journey from Lauterbrunnen to the Miirren plateau (not to Mtirren itself) cost over £1 for two persons last July. In France bed and breakfast is almost always reasonable, but meals, wherever you take them, are ruinously expensive—again measured in sterling. In Switzerland in particular the hoteliers are so courteous and so genuinely friendly that it is sad to contemplate the effect on their fortunes of the virtual pxclusion of British tourists. And the same is true of many other European countries. It is not merely the transient pleasure (and the abiding memories) of British tourists that is being sacrificed, but something in some ways more valuable and more important. Must this be ?
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