Granting Visas John B. Curtin Television Plays Sydney Newman For

Whose Benefit? Brian Murphy Christianity's Lost Continent John V. Taylor The Use of Psychiatric Terms Dr. Murdo Mackenzie Male or Female?

Reg Winter, R. Thinlop, George'E. P. Wood The Casement Diaries Peter Singleton-Gates and Maurice Girodias John Calder

Cars Across the Channel F. D. Y. Faulkner 'Blood. Toil, Tears and Sweat'

Leonard W. Brockington

A Matter of Dignity Katherine Butler

GRANTING VISAS

SIR,—Since last receiving the courtesy of your cor- respondence columns (Spectator, October 3, 1958), on which occasion I referred to the difficulties encoun- tered by Spaniards wishing to visit Britain, 1 have spent an interesting, exhausting but not, I hope, an entirely unprofitable time battering at the doors of bureaucracy. I was provided with an excellent oppor- tunity for this by the desire of my sister-in-law (my wife is Spanish) to take up the invitation of my mother to spend a few months in Britain. To this end, we applied for a visa, which was finally granted after a period of very nearly three months had elapsed from the time of first lodging it. I believe that we were working under extremely favourable circumstances in that the applicant's brother-in-law was English, and that his mother wrote a letter to the Home Office accepting all responsibility for the visitor. One cannot help wondering how anybody with neither of these adjuncts to their application could ever succeed in getting into our country at all.

I raised a complaint through my MP, and the chairman of the British Travel and Holidays Associa- tion also took an interest in the matter, and I received a very charming apology from the Under-Secretary of State at the Home Office. However, I should like to draw your attention, and that of your readers, to my real reason for making the complaint. I want to make HM Government and Ministers realise that we are guilty of a great discourtesy to foreign visitors, and a grave disservice to our own interests, both economic and political, by continuing with these out- moded restrictions on the temporary entry of visitors.

We must do everything in our power to make it as easy as possible for people from other countries to come and see for themselves, and this is an essential

part of the current campaign to 'Sell Britain."What is the use of trying to 'sell' it if the 'goods' are kept out of reach?

If the governmental reply to this question is, in effect, that we must at the same time ensure our own internal security, then I would ask what the nature is of this 'security' that we are trying to protect. What actual, concrete purpose is served by requiring prospective Spanish visitors, for example, to secure the written acceptance of a 'host,' and then keeping them waiting several weeks for a visa? There is no other European country this side of the Iron Curtain that makes such demands upon its visitors, and, as I see it, no country has any right to expect any if it does.

The Spanish Government, as you know, has just announced its willingness to waive visa requirements in relation to the tourists of any other country willing to do the same, their granting of visas already being, practically speaking, only a matter of payment and the more or less automatic delivery of the visa within twenty-four hours. Is this not an excellent opportunity for us to review our own attitude to the matter, and to make similar concessions, if concessions they be?

The Spaniards says that the resultant loss in con- sular fees will be nothing when compared with the increase in their already enviable figures for foreign tourist spending. They estimate that 220,000 Britons visited Spain during the first nine months of last year. What a tonic for some of our own recently querulous summer resorts if even a tenth of that number of Spanish tourists were to spend a month in England this year, as a result of a timely gesture of the Govern- ment in sweeping away the present bureaucratic obstacles!

Perhaps some of those 220,000 who enjoyed the spontaneous and generous courtesy of their Spanish hosts last year will help me to bring this about? 1 have so many friends in Spain who are waiting to take advantage of it.—Yours faithfully,

JOHN B. CURTIN

Plaza de Francia, 8, Tangier, Morocco