by: Tim

Tue, 23 Jan 2007 09:15:50 +0000

I clearly express myself badly, for which I apologise: I certainly don’t mean to turn France’s need to reform into a joke. As for justifying whether reforms are needed - you are right, a proper essay on the subject, or article in Prospect, would do that, but I don’t consider blogs the best place for long, detailed analysis. But I don’t see them as the place for glib comments either, so I try to keep within what I think my unknown reader knows, while trying show him/her things perhaps she/he does not. I think many people, inside and outside France, see the need for reform in its employment laws, its pension scheme, its health system and, as you say, in its attitude towards small business. But reform is a wide word and I do not intend it to mean “radical overhaul from top to bottom”. M. de Villepin’s way of putting the CPE on the statute book was certainly kack-handed, but that does not mean what he was trying to do did not have a core of good sense. It might have helped some of the young people in the deprived cités. As to miss-spelling Hollande, again I apologise, this time for my spell-checker which is too anglo-centric. As to comparing levels of British and French poverty, all I would say is Beware. Comparing statistics, especially between two countries, is fraught and I try to avoid it, as I say in About This Blog. The French are not agreed on what % of their population live below the poverty level, or even how many are unemployed. But in any case, poverty is not something to argue about, it is something to do something about.

by: Gulliver Cragg

Tue, 23 Jan 2007 07:45:43 +0000

I don’t like the way you say “everyone knows” France needs to be reformed. People always do, of course. But even if there are good reasons for thinking it, it is no good to simply assert it without justification and turn it into a joke, when a significant proportion of intelligent and politically aware people, in France but also elsewhere, do not think France needs those kinds of liberalising reforms at all. My view would be that French employment law does need some liberalising, and that life needs to be made far, far easier for small businesses here. But it does not follow from that that Villepin was right to try to push the first job contract through in the way that he did. Anyone with minimal awareness of how the French public tends to react to such things would have done it more carefully, and even the employers union, the MEDEF, thought it was a badly thought-out plan. Nor does it follow, from the admission that some of France’s more socialistic laws probably do need to be made more liberal, that what France needs is Thatcherism. And I think that the common tendency in the English language press to simply state again and again how desperately France needs reform, and how everyone knows it, gives the impression that we think that is what France needs. Don’t forget the number of French people living below the poverty line is about a third what it is in Britain, apparently less in need of reform. Also you spelt Hollande wrong. But I am following your blog with interest.

Comments on: Smoke screens

by: Tim

by: Gulliver Cragg