- 14 Mar 2003 04:57
#2481
France? Simply a better place to live
The United Kingdom's socialism is fatally anaemic compared to its full-blooded counterpart across the English Channel
Will Hutton
Sunday September 2, 2001
The Observer
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Co ... 19,00.html
Those duplicitous and incomprehensible French! Their farmers, fishermen and lorry drivers hold not just France but the entire EU to ransom. Their politicians are corrupt. They have a 35-hour week and high taxes. Their public sector spends extravagantly. They champion fashionable left-wing causes, capping it last week with their ex-Trotskyite Prime Minister backing an impractical tax on foreign-exchange speculators. All proof that Britain should never have gone near the EU and why the euro must be resisted to the last.
Under Lionel Jospin, France gets short shrift from the British media, reflecting deep-seated suspicions about matters French and, especially, French socialism. New Labour finds the Jospin government ideologically irresponsible. Its preoccupation with outmoded ideas like the social contract and the interests of workers consistently prevent the EU's 'modernisation' along the lines advocated by American conservatives.
New Labour's hostility is part of a wider cultural divide. In a small village in the Gard valley, I learned how the villagers were coming to terms with the new English couple. Strident in their denunciations of the EU, local tradesmen and French public services, it was a matter of some wonder why they were in France at all. But what really fascinated the locals were the stories of her imported hostess trolley, complete with hot plates in a climate where midday temperatures climb to 38C, where pre-cooked chicken famously languished for hours before being served. The trolley had become a symbol of an unbridgeable cultural and culinary chasm.
Last week, the editorial and City comment pages of our leading broadsheets were afflicted by hostess-trolley malaise over Lionel Jospin's willingness to throw France's weight behind the Tobin tax. Since economist James Tobin proposed a tiny tax on foreign-exchange transactions 30 years ago turnover in the foreign-exchange markets has increased 20 times while world GDP has grown at a tenth of the rate. Successive economies have been hit by irresistible speculation, and British manufacturing is currently on the rack as the foreign-exchange markets overvalue the pound.
As more than 80 per cent of these transactions are reversed in a week, taxing foreign-exchange turnover would be an effective, if small, deterrent to some of the instability it generates. The difficulty is implementation, because every major financial centre would have to agree to make the tax policeable. But if one G7 country expressed interest, there is a chance of the necessary coalition being built.
But this was not how Jospin's move was interpreted. The FT insisted he must have ulterior motives - placating the French anti-globalisation movement - to explain his otherwise silly idea, while the Guardian City pages included a bankers' homily in praise of liquidity as the lubrication of markets, missing the point that there can be too much liquidity which leaches into speculation, and which is the rationale for the tax. But behind those reflex responses stands an English cultural distrust which is all embracing. New Labour strategists will have groaned. Now they have another stupid idea coming from Europe which they will have to head off.
That the Tobin tax or some variant might be an interesting proposition, that Jospin might actually believe in it and that there was now a coalition to be built was the ultra minority view. Britain's reflex opposition is rather depressing. The French are perfidious, remember, and have no grasp of the laws of economics or the practicalities of contemporary capitalism. Proof-positive of this is their 35-hour week. Only the economically illiterate could even begin to justify this massive, job-destroying infringement of labour market flexibility. Yet the paradox is that in the 20 months it has been going, France has generated more than 500,000 jobs, as an Industrial Society study explains.(France versus the Anglo-Saxon economists, www.indsoc.co.uk)
The reason is that the legislation is not for a 35-hour week, but for a 1,600-hour year (250 hours less than we work) and that within this framework French employers and employees can organise enormously flexible work patterns and clever use of capital. It's part of a tradition of smart regulation that has led French output per man hour to grow explosively over the last 15 years, so that it is now 9 per cent higher than in the US. On the other hand, 20 years of labour market deregulation in Britain has hardly closed our productivity gap while leaving large sections of the community desperately poor.
And what that has bought is a public infrastructure to die for. The Paris Metro system and the high-speed train network speak for themselves, but so do the spare capacity in their hospital system and the extraordinary investment in schools in low income areas. Equally, the concern to maintain the social contract means that French citizens can expect to retire with a decent pension, instead of increasingly having to rely on the lottery of the capital markets, as we do.
Maybe the French state has shortcomings in delivering its objectives, while parts of its political and official class are mired in corruption. But the state can be reformed and politicians and officials made accountable. Meanwhile, we watch our financial and business class being paid stratospheric sums for superintending what remains a low-wage, low-productivity, low-investment economy, with negligible chances of their becoming more accountable.
In short, the dreary laws of Gradgrind economics that we accept as axiomatic in Britain are disproved daily by our old rival. And the British are beginning to vote with their feet. We've bought half-a-million homes in France, not only because of the sunshine and the wine, but because it's a better place to live. Fourteen years of the socialist Mitterand and now four years of the socialist Jospin have left their mark - and from which we could learn. Down with the culture of the hostess trolley and euro-scepticism. Vive smart regulation. Vive the social contract. Vive high public spending. Vive la France.
The United Kingdom's socialism is fatally anaemic compared to its full-blooded counterpart across the English Channel
Will Hutton
Sunday September 2, 2001
The Observer
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Co ... 19,00.html
Those duplicitous and incomprehensible French! Their farmers, fishermen and lorry drivers hold not just France but the entire EU to ransom. Their politicians are corrupt. They have a 35-hour week and high taxes. Their public sector spends extravagantly. They champion fashionable left-wing causes, capping it last week with their ex-Trotskyite Prime Minister backing an impractical tax on foreign-exchange speculators. All proof that Britain should never have gone near the EU and why the euro must be resisted to the last.
Under Lionel Jospin, France gets short shrift from the British media, reflecting deep-seated suspicions about matters French and, especially, French socialism. New Labour finds the Jospin government ideologically irresponsible. Its preoccupation with outmoded ideas like the social contract and the interests of workers consistently prevent the EU's 'modernisation' along the lines advocated by American conservatives.
New Labour's hostility is part of a wider cultural divide. In a small village in the Gard valley, I learned how the villagers were coming to terms with the new English couple. Strident in their denunciations of the EU, local tradesmen and French public services, it was a matter of some wonder why they were in France at all. But what really fascinated the locals were the stories of her imported hostess trolley, complete with hot plates in a climate where midday temperatures climb to 38C, where pre-cooked chicken famously languished for hours before being served. The trolley had become a symbol of an unbridgeable cultural and culinary chasm.
Last week, the editorial and City comment pages of our leading broadsheets were afflicted by hostess-trolley malaise over Lionel Jospin's willingness to throw France's weight behind the Tobin tax. Since economist James Tobin proposed a tiny tax on foreign-exchange transactions 30 years ago turnover in the foreign-exchange markets has increased 20 times while world GDP has grown at a tenth of the rate. Successive economies have been hit by irresistible speculation, and British manufacturing is currently on the rack as the foreign-exchange markets overvalue the pound.
As more than 80 per cent of these transactions are reversed in a week, taxing foreign-exchange turnover would be an effective, if small, deterrent to some of the instability it generates. The difficulty is implementation, because every major financial centre would have to agree to make the tax policeable. But if one G7 country expressed interest, there is a chance of the necessary coalition being built.
But this was not how Jospin's move was interpreted. The FT insisted he must have ulterior motives - placating the French anti-globalisation movement - to explain his otherwise silly idea, while the Guardian City pages included a bankers' homily in praise of liquidity as the lubrication of markets, missing the point that there can be too much liquidity which leaches into speculation, and which is the rationale for the tax. But behind those reflex responses stands an English cultural distrust which is all embracing. New Labour strategists will have groaned. Now they have another stupid idea coming from Europe which they will have to head off.
That the Tobin tax or some variant might be an interesting proposition, that Jospin might actually believe in it and that there was now a coalition to be built was the ultra minority view. Britain's reflex opposition is rather depressing. The French are perfidious, remember, and have no grasp of the laws of economics or the practicalities of contemporary capitalism. Proof-positive of this is their 35-hour week. Only the economically illiterate could even begin to justify this massive, job-destroying infringement of labour market flexibility. Yet the paradox is that in the 20 months it has been going, France has generated more than 500,000 jobs, as an Industrial Society study explains.(France versus the Anglo-Saxon economists, www.indsoc.co.uk)
The reason is that the legislation is not for a 35-hour week, but for a 1,600-hour year (250 hours less than we work) and that within this framework French employers and employees can organise enormously flexible work patterns and clever use of capital. It's part of a tradition of smart regulation that has led French output per man hour to grow explosively over the last 15 years, so that it is now 9 per cent higher than in the US. On the other hand, 20 years of labour market deregulation in Britain has hardly closed our productivity gap while leaving large sections of the community desperately poor.
And what that has bought is a public infrastructure to die for. The Paris Metro system and the high-speed train network speak for themselves, but so do the spare capacity in their hospital system and the extraordinary investment in schools in low income areas. Equally, the concern to maintain the social contract means that French citizens can expect to retire with a decent pension, instead of increasingly having to rely on the lottery of the capital markets, as we do.
Maybe the French state has shortcomings in delivering its objectives, while parts of its political and official class are mired in corruption. But the state can be reformed and politicians and officials made accountable. Meanwhile, we watch our financial and business class being paid stratospheric sums for superintending what remains a low-wage, low-productivity, low-investment economy, with negligible chances of their becoming more accountable.
In short, the dreary laws of Gradgrind economics that we accept as axiomatic in Britain are disproved daily by our old rival. And the British are beginning to vote with their feet. We've bought half-a-million homes in France, not only because of the sunshine and the wine, but because it's a better place to live. Fourteen years of the socialist Mitterand and now four years of the socialist Jospin have left their mark - and from which we could learn. Down with the culture of the hostess trolley and euro-scepticism. Vive smart regulation. Vive the social contract. Vive high public spending. Vive la France.
- By litwin
- By Puffer Fish
- By Tainari88
- By Unthinking Majority