Skip to main content

Crise de nerf

Three million people on the streets of Paris. All protesting about the most minor of changes to labour laws that would probably have a slightly positive effect on the high rates of French unemployment.

This seems to be another waymark in the decline of France into political and economic irrelevance. President Jacques Chirac, himself re-elected for his second term only in preference to the extreme and thuggish Jean-Marie Le Pen, continues to brazen out a leadership that has utterly run out of ideas.

The narrow elite of the French Republic, educated in the Grandes Ecoles, seems gripped with doubt. The confidence of Charles de Gaulle or Jean Monnet in a certaine idee de La France has given way to a defensive and querulous determination to resist change. Now around 200,000 French citizens have come to Britain- French schools in London are massively over subscribed, and the streets of South Kensington now echo to the language of Voltaire on a scale not seen ever before. Could anything demonstrate more clearly the failure of "the French model" than the fact that its most gilded products can no longer find a satisfactory home in France?

There is another side to the French nervous breakdown. In my own family, my French brother in law has built a highly successful business, despite the fact that he is not a product of the higher university system himself. However, he has built his business in Britain, since in France he may not rise beyond a certain level in either public or private sector. In the UK he is now a highly successful entrepreneur ( a word, I should remind President Bush, that is French in origin). As passionate Frenchman as he is, especially when it comes to sport, he finds far more opportunities in the UK than in France.

No wonder that three million people are on the streets- but they are fighting the wrong battles. No-one owes France a living, and no-one will pay French bills, if they themselves will not. The openness and ambition that characterized the first years of the French Fifth Republic has given way to fear. The theatrical exit that M. Chirac manufactured when one of his countrymen addressed a European body in English, reflected a cultural defensiveness rather than confidence. The rudeness that he showed to the new entrants into the European Union has not been forgotten. Despite being on the popular (and perhaps correct) side of the argument as far as the invasion of Iraq is concerned, France has squandered its opportunities.

France is at a crossroads- A key player in Europe seems depressingly unable to face up to the need for radical social changes in order to respond to the revitalised challenge of Asia. For as long as this willful blindness continues, the crisis will continue. However, this is France, and her fractious, argumentative and free people will not tolerate for long the kind of failure that this generation of politicians, drawn from the same narrow and homogeneous power elite, are prepared to serve up to them.

Vive La Revolution!

Comments

Cicero said…
Bloody Hell, I see that the French Embassy now thinks that over 400,000 Young, French workers have come to the UK... thought I detected better croissants at Pret a Manger.

Popular posts from this blog

Post Truth and Justice

The past decade has seen the rise of so-called "post truth" politics.  Instead of mere misrepresentation of facts to serve an argument, political figures began to put forward arguments which denied easily provable facts, and then blustered and browbeat those who pointed out the lie.  The political class was able to get away with "post truth" positions because the infrastructure that reported their activity has been suborned directly into the process. In short, the media abandoned long-cherished traditions of objectivity and began a slow slide into undeclared bias and partisanship.  The "fourth estate" was always a key piece of how democratic societies worked, since the press, and later the broadcast media could shape opinion by the way they reported on the political process. As a result there has never been a golden age of objective media, but nevertheless individual reporters acquired better or worse reputations for the quality of their reporting and

Media misdirection

In the small print of the UK budget we find that the Chancellor of the Exchequer (the British Finance Minister) has allocated a further 15 billion Pounds to the funding for the UK track and trace system. This means that the cost of the UK´s track and trace system is now 37 billion Pounds.  That is approximately €43 billion or US$51 billion, which is to say that it is amount of money greater than the national GDP of over 110 countries, or if you prefer, it is roughly the same number as the combined GDP of the 34 smallest economies of the planet.  As at December 2020, 70% of the contracts for the track and trace system were awarded by the Conservative government without a competitive tender being made . The program is overseen by Dido Harding , who is not only a Conservative Life Peer, but the wife of a Conservative MP, John Penrose, and a contemporary of David Cameron and Boris Johnson at Oxford. Many of these untendered contracts have been given to companies that seem to have no notewo

We need to talk about UK corruption

After a long hiatus, mostly to do with indolence and partly to do with the general election campaign, I feel compelled to take up the metaphorical pen and make a few comments on where I see the situation of the UK in the aftermath of the "Brexit election". OK, so we lost.  We can blame many reasons, though fundamentally the Conservatives refused to make the mistakes of 2017 and Labour and especially the Liberal Democrats made every mistake that could be made.  Indeed the biggest mistake of all was allowing Johnson to hold the election at all, when another six months would probably have eaten the Conservative Party alive.  It was Jo Swinson's first, but perhaps most critical, mistake to make, and from it came all the others.  The flow of defectors and money persuaded the Liberal Democrat bunker that an election could only be better for the Lib Dems, and as far as votes were concerned, the party did indeed increase its vote by 1.3 million.   BUT, and it really is the bi