Cheese eating surrender monkeys? No, just more bad government…

Don’t get me wrong, I love France. I speak the language and I adore the place. The weather, the people the food, the way of life – in short most everything. So I’m not gonna take any cheap shots over WW1 or WW2. After all, France bled to death in the first war and with Germany literally right next door and the country being without the natural defences Britain has with the channel, couldn’t do much about the Blitzkrieg in the second. I don’t think anyone in their right mind really expected the might of the Wehrmacht and dozens of 50 ton Panzers to be stopped at border crossings by the wooden barriers you find at your local parking lot.
But there’s one thing I just can’t get over and that’s the absolute weakness of the recent government who, with not one but both eyes shamelessly focussed not on doing the right thing but simply saving their own political hides to get re-elected, handed over the governorship of the entire country to a bunch of students protesting about – and get this – the mere possibility of not being promised a job for life when the new first flexible employment contracts for under 26’s were proposed.
Now I’m the last person to subscribe to the ‘hire ‘em and fire ‘em’ brigade, but without going into the already well covered details of the contracts, surely no one in their right mind expects to get a gold-plated guarantee they will have a job for life. Hullo!?
Economic and productivity growth in France is almost zero, unemployment hovers between 11 and almost 13% (more if you ignore the ‘structural adjustments’ made to lower the numbers), public spending is huge and they have an aging population still able to retire way too early (55 in some cases) on gold-plated social benefits schemes. Money’s flowing out the door like water and very little is coming back in. Something’s gotta give…
Their original societal model was to soften the sometime brutal forces of market competition with a ‘managed’ economy, but it has become so restrictive now it is more like a sclerotic one instead. Companies can’t fire workers (too hard or too costly), so they just simply don’t employ them. Entrepreneurs move to other countries because doing business in France is just too hard (areas in Kent resound to the sound of French ex-pats who crossed the channel and take their money and the jobs with them to be welcomed with open arms instead of volumes of regulations at home). Young plucky citizens who speak English trek to London to chase work where as one young lady said ‘At least here they’re prepared to give you a go’.
What the country needs drastically is less regulation and more incentives to manufacture, sell and employ, but instead for about the third (or is it the fourth?) time, the Government has once more buckled and all the country got was yet more restrictive employment laws, more taxpayer funded subsidies and yet more dead-end ‘training programs’ that in the end will result in very few jobs.
France (and Italy and Germany) desperately need their own Margaret Thatcher - someone in for the long haul who will take on the Unions and the students without blinking. The people need to be re-educated that no-one owes them a job for life and that by protesting these very minor reforms, they are just making life worse for themselves and indeed their children’s future. But no, like King Canute trying to hold back the tide, they all pull up the shutters, pile on the regulations and just want the bad, bad world and globalisation to go away.
The managed economy in its present form is not working. That doesn’t mean they need to adopt the limited social welfare U.S. model either – they could opt for a hybrid like the Scandinavian system with open markets financing a realistic social system. But at the moment, all they are doing is what the British called in the twilight days of Empire, following a policy of the ‘orderly management of decline’.