Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

The French author of the, largely, anti-American blog SuperFrenchie called us anti-France in a recent post.

As usual, he takes an aggressive tone but let’s look at what we’ve said here in the past.

We criticised the local education system for choosing not to educate children who don’t speak fluent French at age16 and not providing any means for those children to learn French. Are we right to be critical? Yes. Are we just wanting France to be like the UK? No, because most European countries provide these facilities for immigrants ie we think France should be more European.

We said that the French need to start using toilets. They are the only country I know where you can’t drive for a day without seeing someone peeing beside the road. It gives France a bad image and that’s why we’re critical of this practice.

We’ve been critical of French labour laws because they limit employment for the French. These days service type companies can work nearly anywhere and thoses jobs will just flow away from France if the employment laws don’t change which can’t be good for France.

We’re critical too of the really bad customer service in France. It’s not that we want France to be more like the UK but more like everywhere else in the world. The French do themselves a great dis-service by not demanding more.

I don’t think we’ve said yet but we’re also critical of the practice of French politicians always backing down in the face of any protests. As we said recently this gets the people what they want, which is often not what they need.

Of course, SuperFrenchie goes on to take quotes out of context as when he says that we’ve said things when we’re just quoting one of the election candidates.

So, yes, we are critical of France in a number of areas but we praise it too. I think it’s sad that we’re not writing this on a souped up version of Minitel and that, in general, France didn’t look outside the country to sell that and other French developed technology. For that matter, it’s a shame that we aren’t all using the Dvorak keyboard layout.

As we said recently, being critical of the government does’t make you anti the country because if it did then all politicians would be classed as being against their country. After all, their job is to change things.

Ordinarily the ill-will between America and France simply passes us by but with venturing out into blog-land a more than usual of late I’m that little bit more conscious of it from seeing the likes of the ever present anti-American sentiments of SuperFrenchie (ironically living in America).

That makes it more unusual to read of the thoughts of Nicolas Sarkozy who is very much pro-America and, in many ways, against seemingly core beliefs of his native France.

He is openly critical of the anti-work ethic of the French and the related anti-capitalism too. For him, the holding back of the entrepreneurs through excessive regulation and taxes has merely served to enpoverish everyone.

On the whole he would seem to be the ideal selection for France but his ideas run so much contrary to the cozy status-quo that I just can’t see him getting elected when there’s the opportunity to elect Royal and get even deeper into that spiralling cycle of increased regulation, benefits and taxes.

Perhaps next time around it will be his turn but by then the social costs of the turnaround from Royal’s policies will be enormous.

Belfast has always had a slightly rural feel about it. The countryside isn’t far from anywhere in the town and you can almost always see the green fields that surround the city. In other ways too it has never been terribly cosmopolitan with nightlife being relatively quiet for many years.

All that is changing though. For a number of years the nightlife has been getting considerably more lively and the city centre remains busy in the evenings these days with the increasing number of nightclubs and the like opening around the city not to mention the massive increase in city centre apartments that have been constructed over the last ten years or so.

A striking example that I found in my recent trip was the appearance of Anna Lo’s face on an election poster. You’d never have seen her before not because there was discrimination against non-whites here but rather because there weren’t any non-whites. Yet another welcome indication of the settling in of peace.

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.