Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Commentary’ Category

It doesn’t seem that long ago that I was writing the first post of this blog to say that we’d gotten the mortgage for our place in France yet that was 199 posts ago, hence this retrospective on life as a blogger since then.

Those of you who have been reading this since the start may remember the days when it was Mas Camps News. At that time, the bulk of the postings were on topics relating to the preparations for our move to France and later on various aspects of settling into life in France. We’re gradually collecting the fruits of our experience of this on our Buying a House in France postings so that others can learn from our mishaps and mistakes.

Eventually we managed to pass the hurdles that the French administration put seemingly at every step of our journey though it wasn’t really as bad as that. In fact, most of the time all we needed was a “roadmap” to guide us as to where to go at each point and hopefully the reference version of our series on moving to France will eventually amount to that for those who come after us.

The end of the hurdles seemed to come all of a sudden and y’all can see when that happened by glancing at the number of posts per month. One day we looked and found that there’d been nothing written for months! It wasn’t that we weren’t busy but that there wasn’t much particularly new or striking to write about after we’d broken through the barrier of French administration, or nothing that would fit within the confines of Mas Camps News at any rate.

But over that time of nothing there was quite a buildup of topics that we should have been writing about and so the blog was reborn in its new home just last Summer. No more is it “Mas Camps News” for we’ve pretty much settled into life here and though it retains aspects of its incarnation as “Living in France without a TV crew” it’s quite a different beastie these days touching on pretty much everything that we come across here and when we’re out and about.

The main thing that has changed though is that it’s living as a proper blog these days rather than a hi-tech newsletter for the folks back home. That’ll probably change things a lot over the next 200 entries as we’re attracting readers from the outside world these days. Indeed just recently we were asked by France24 to contribute our views on the upcoming French election.

We’ve also recently given birth to a second blog where Wendy’s getting started on discussing life from an Australian perspective and we’re even considering a third (’tis an addictive hobby).

In years gone by the French were one of the most backward nations in the world with their use of the Internet. They stuck resolutely to their France-only Minitel system and, for the most part, refused to have anything to do with the American-dominated Internet.

That situation is changing very quickly. For example, whilst we had our first ever online reservation from a French person just two Summers ago, nowadays they are commonplace. So, it’s not surprising that the election campaign has gone online in an equally big way. Blogs are coming to be an expected part of that with the Royal campaign blog started early on and campaigning even taking place on SecondLife. Not so long ago, I’d have said that the SecondLife campaign office was totally crazy but apparently the swing against the recent EU referendum was started with the blog from an obscure teacher in Marseille so it would appear possible to swing public opinion in the real world from our vantage point in the virtual one, even in France.

But what about the real politics? Royal prefers intuition to ideology and is said to be good on the “small things” that arise in truly local politics and weak on the bigger picture. She is deliberately vague and promises to consult the people which are, in some ways, excellent approaches. The problem is that when one consults the people one finds out what the people want, not necessarily what they need.

Where she is more specific there are clear contradictions in her policies. In her economic policy objectives she wants to raise the minimum wage substantially, to abolish the CNE labour law (which makes hiring & firing easier for small companies) and to promote even more mass-unionisation (in an already highly unionised country), all clear job destroyers. Yet, on the other hand, she also hopes to create 500,000 youth jobs, generate training opportunities for longer term unemployed youths and even review the 35 hour week. Those two groups of objectives seem to be in clear opposition. Throughout her policies there is the underlying strand of more state intervention with talk of state aid (barely mentioned elsewhere in the world), increased tax on dividends (thus discouraging investment), state regulation of banking fees (no doubt to support the indigenous banks) and renationalisation of EDF/GDF.

What about Sarkozy though? Well, to our eyes he appears more of a “normal” western European politician with his hopes to encourage the job creators to return home to France, to cut taxes and generally free up the state burden on the population. However, he’s unlikely to do much about the farming subsidies or go far to address France’s head in the sand approach to globalisation.

The problem that both face on behalf of the country is that, whilst they might complain about their taxes, the French like their cozy system of benefits and jobs for life. After all, why would anyone want to bother working a 40 hour week when they could work a 35 hour week for the same salary? For that matter, if Royal’s proposal to take unemployment benefit to 90% of that received from one’s previous job, why would anyone want to work at all? This approach is quite typically French in totally ignoring what the rest of the world is getting up to. That, of course, is the main problem with French politics. For example, when an attempt was made to make it easier to hire & fire young people in early 2006, the predictable result was riots in the streets and, equally predictably, a climbdown by the government. Whilst the people needed jobs, what they wanted were jobs for life.

I suspect that this time around the French people will get what they want which is pretty much what Royal has on offer. However, what they need is Sarkozy, if he’s strong enough to push through his policies in spite of certain opposition to a number of them.

Although MI6 was less than pleased (to put it mildly) when Bond zoomed right past their real-life headquarters on the opening sequence of “The World is Not Enough”, just a few years later and we find MI5, their internal security counterparts, advertising for spies on the Internet and indeed even MI6 now feature a nice photo of said headquarters on their own site. Of course, “we” have agents (or, rather, Mobile Surveillance Officers), it is “they” who have spies.

In days gone by, recruitment was by way of the old boy network. It was more than enough for X to say that you were a “reliable chap” for you to find yourself asked by someone in “the Service” to help your country. Unfortunately, the days when the British Empire was mainly up against the Soviet Union are long since gone and the threat is much more from the likes of Muslim extremists these days. The old boy network certainly never included ethnic minorities and, for that matter, rarely extended outside the public school network so they need to look for new ways to find people who can infiltrate the organisations posing the present-day threats.

The more paranoid of you will realise that this entry has so many trigger words that my ‘lil ‘ole blog is sure to attract the interest of MI5. Given the “request” by MI5 some years back to have their routers installed directly on the networks of all UK based ISPs, the paranoid amongst you are more than likely right this time. Sadly, I just can’t see MI5 appearing on the site stats somehow but hopefully I’ll keep one of the chaps or chappettes in ****** ***** or  **** amused now and again in the future.

I, of course, have shot myself down re applying by way of this post as I’m fairly sure that posting such discussions fall well outside of the guidelines they quote, namely “Discretion is important to the Service, so please only discuss this application with your partner and/or immediate family.”. Although, for the true conspiracy theorists, I could be an MI5 plant and double-bluffing the lot of you!

Seriously though, if you’re British and have lived in the UK for most of your life, it is one of the ways that you could help to defend the British way of life in a very constructive, if usually unseen way.

The issue of sites posting guest reviews of accommodation has been picked up by Karen over at Europe A La Carte.

Most of the debate to date is on the issue of hotel owners posting bogus and glowing reviews on the likes of Trip Advisor but I suspect that they are few and far between. Looking at it from the other side of the fence so to speak, there are equally problems of negative comments by guests who have never even stayed or who, when something goes wrong, blame everything on the hotel.

Consider a few of the examples that we have seen over the last year.

1. “…in the middle of nowhere…” . It’s certainly quite true that the hotel was in the countryside and not in the city. The guests in question hadn’t even bothered to read the first line of the description which quite clearly states that yet they blamed the hotel for not being in the city-centre location that they really wanted.

2. “…the hairdryer in the room had quite a smell when used…”. They were using the room heater to dry their hair and the smell was their own hair being burnt.

3. “…they didn’t know when we were arriving…”. Not surprising in that the reservation system they’d used doesn’t ask them that question and therefore the hotel don’t know when to expect guests that have used it.

4. “…all the restaurants were closed when they said they’d be open….”. From a guest who hadn’t changed the time on their watch when they arrived in France with the effect that every time they turned up at “1pm” for lunch the restaurants were closed as it was actually 2pm.

5.”…the reception staff weren’t French…”. Try booking into a London hotel and finding any English staff!

Many review sites make checks that the guests have actually stayed there but Trip Advisor appears to take anything that comes with no checks at all. We’ve seen “interesting” reviews by people who clearly have never stepped inside the door or, if they have, must have been high on something given the list of things they saw which didn’t exist in reality. We’re not talking debateable issues like whether or not the place has been dusted but things like broken windows which clearly aren’t broken.

The review facilities run by the likes of Booking.com are in a different league. To my mind, the problem with them is that they generally don’t offer a facility for hotel management to comment on the reviews made. Since they also clearly have an interest in getting people into their hotels, the tendency is to allow management to have the negative comments deleted. Now, this gets rid of the idiotic comments as above but it also potentially allows unscrupulous hotels to artificially bump up their ratings by getting rid of the really negative comments (although, one hopes, that a genuinely bad hotel wouldn’t get away with that). Probably the most extreme example of this is HostelWorld (used by Ryanair and very popular) where the management can select which reviews and ratings they’d like to appear (they can’t edit them) so, naturally, it’s possible to manipulate your rating and some places would appear to do that thereby getting a rating of close to 100% vs a more reasonable 70-80%.

So, yes, let’s see if we can get rid of the bogus reviews but let’s not limit it to those of owners/managers who are inflating their rating but also the overlly negative reviews of unreasonable guests who blame everything that goes wrong on everyone else.

How to do that is the big question though. Anyone can create a hotmail account and get a review onto many sites without any confirmation that they’ve actually been a guest there. It’s clearly not viable for the majority of Internet sites to actually visit the hotels being commented on yet some kind of cross-check is definitely required and, at the moment, many sites don’t appear to even read the comments before they put them on.