Swiss alarm
Sir: Geoffrey Sampson's article on Switzerland (2 May) was so unsatisfactory that I hope you will allow me to make two very important points.
The first is that the Swiss have a demographic problem of immense complexity. With a population of only six million of which a million are foreigners, a small area (largely uninhabitable), four official languages, two established religions, and great social and economic differences between the different geographical regions, it is absolutely essential for them, if they are to have any hope of retaining their way of life as it now exists — which is what they intend to do — that they should be chary about extending the right of taking up permanent residence to further large numbers of foreigners. They nearly got swamped by foreign workers in the late Fifties and Sixties, but after a great deal of debate they stemmed the tide just in time.
The second point is that the Swiss people govern themselves, in a way totally alien to anything in our experience as a nation. This is a fact that seems to infuriate a certain type of Englishman, particularly the academic. The English, and indeed the British, seem to prefer to leave their government to Hankey, Pankey and Sankey. That is their right though it does not appear to work very well. But if one can imagine for a moment that they did govern themselves, do you, Sir, or your contributor really think that they would not have handled our immigration problem with more caution than their political masters have done and very much more on the lines adopted by the Swiss? J, M. Walsh
Haslemere, Surrey
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