Swiss sense and satisfaction. An example for Britain

My wife Danielle holds just one nationality, French, but by birth, with a wholly Swiss father and a half-Swiss mother, she’s more Swiss than anything else.

No to breaking bridges to Europe...
If only the Brits could learn to be so smart

My stepson David (pure coincidence) is French and British (just like me, as it happens, if the other way around) but he was actually born in Switzerland.

When I first met Danielle, her mother lived in a street that ended at a field. Beyond that field, a few minutes’ walk away, could be seen the first apartment blocks of the Swiss city of Basel. Her aunt lived in the Canton of Geneva, and we often visited her in her house near that great Swiss city.

So one way or another, Switzerland loomed large in my life for a while, and I spent quite a lot of time there. And one of the things that annoyed me most about the place was that it was so damned self-satisfied. I mean, they didn’t even grant women the right to vote until 1971. That was at federal level, and the last canton – state – didn’t extend the suffrage to women until 1990, and on the most extraordinary of pretexts, that voting took place by show of hands on the market square, and it was too small to allow women to join the men.

But then I looked around the place and I realised that, for all its faults, Switzerland actually had a lot to be satisfied about. We met a (French) social worker employed in Basel who had sent a girl in social service care to London to learn English; while there, the girl had, on her own initiative, got herself admitted to the Royal Ballet School; the social services decided to fund her to go back again.

I don’t know any other country which would spend that much for a child in care.

Even more striking was the flood of refugees the country took in. The Rwandan genocide took place during the time that I was visiting the country regularly, and it was striking to see the number of tall, magnificent Tutsi refugees we would see on the streets. We got to know one of them well.

In fact, the number of immigrants is perhaps one of the most remarkable aspects of Swiss life. The United Kingdom has a high percentage of immigrants, 12.4% of the entire population, though to listen to the moaning of many of our xenophobes, you might imagine it was far higher than that. It was that xenophobia which gave the Leave side its victory in the 2016 Brexit referendum.

Germany has a lower percentage of immigrants, though not by much: 11.9%. That’s created quite a problem too, with the far-right Alternative for Germany making advances. However, they’ve never broken through, and Angela Merkel, much criticised for having let in 1.7 million refugees, is once more riding high in the polls. As the Guardian recently argued, the country has adapted. Certainly, it continues to be Europe’s most powerful economy.

Switzerland also has a great economy (that’s why they can look after children in care so well). In fact, it’s only the smaller population that keeps its economy smaller, though per head it’s far ahead. And yet Switzerland takes even more immigrants than either Germany or the UK. Astonishingly, almost 29% of the population is made up of immigrants.

That’s led to complaints there as well. The anti-immigrant Swiss People’s Party (SVP), though far from a majority, is the biggest single party in the Parliament. 

Switzerland isn’t a member of the EU. But it is a member of the single market, and also of the Schengen system of open borders. Without actually joining the Union, it has built a large number of bilateral agreements with EU members, all of which depend on its membership of the single market and Schengen group.

So when the SVP launched a referendum to pull Switzerland out of the two systems, there was consternation in government, business and quite a lot of the population. The economy, as we’ve seen, is doing well. Everyone benefits from that. Knocking out a key element of the foundation on which the wealth is built would be pretty stupid. “Worse than Brexit,” many said.

Well, they didn’t. Some 62% of the electorate said “no, thanks, we’re staying in”. They sent the SVP off to lick its wounds.

No wonder the Swiss have so much to be satisfied about. They’ve rejected the xenophobia that seems to have so many Brits in its grip. And they can see a good deal when they have one, and their membership of EU organisations is a very good deal for them. Nor do they feel to close their borders to immigrants, as the SVP wanted: as the Germans are learning, immigrants contribute to wealth much more than they take from it.

What a pity Brits couldn’t be as sensible as the Swiss. We might have understood that ‘taking back control’ was just an empty phrase, not worth the cost we’re going to pay. Swiss good sense might have led us to Swiss levels of prosperity and even Swiss levels of satisfaction.