Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Local Administration’ Category

As you’ll have noticed, I’ve posted next to nothing over the last month. A total of seven posts vs what would have been a more normal 30 in fact.

That’s because I’ve been over in Northern Ireland trying to sort out some administration since June 5th and only got back home on Friday evening.

Now, I wasn’t expecting there to be much change in the traffic on my websites but the blog is different. The most commonly held belief is that you need to post at least once a day to keep up the traffic. That seems reasonable: after all, blogs, for the most part, cover “current events” in some fashion so without the regular updates, the traffic on a blog is bound to drop off quite quickly, isn’t it?

Well, the funny thing is that the blog traffic didn’t drop at all by any meaningful amount. The number of hits showed very little change at all nor did the adsense income. The number of subscribers via Feedburner dropped about 10%. The number of incoming links as counted by Technorati went up.

So little was the change that it has me wondering if the best strategy would be to build up a blog over six months or so then start a new one.

Seeing as SuperFrenchie thinks I’m “just” anti-French, I thought I’d redress the balance a little and point out one area where the UK is anti-European too.

I was in getting my driving license renewed last week which is something of a hit and miss affair as the explanatory leaflet leaves a LOT to be desired in clarity. Even though the thing was in English and, one would assume therefore that I’d understand it, the opening paragraph on what proof of ID was required was totally incomprehensible and appeared to be totally wrong too.

It opens by saying that if you have a colour photograph on your existing driving license then you don’t need to have someone certify your photograph nor to present a passport. Except, that when my father presented his renewal application complete with his old driving license with colour photo, they wouldn’t renew it without his passport.

It then goes on to say that you always need to have your photo certified yet they happily renewed mine with only my passport.

Then it says “digital photographs are not acceptable” yet they DO accept them, mainly because all of the photobooth machines only produce digital photos these days.

The best bit is perhaps their definition of residency. Despite living in France for three years, I still qualify for a Northern Ireland driving license as, according to their definition, I am still resident there!

However, none of that’s anti-European….

Whilst we were there, one of the increasing number of Polish immigrants arrived to exchange his license for a Northern Ireland one. In theory, he doesn’t actually need to change it at all but the lady in the office reckoned that he had to change it within six months (anti-European point 1). He presented his Polish ID card. Not acceptable: we need a passport (anti-European point 2) which isn’t actually what it says on their website. What she said he needed was to have his photo certified by someone in Northern Ireland who knew him for two years.

Emmm, so he MUST change his driving license within six months and, because you won’t take his valid ID card, he must find someone in Northern Ireland who knew him 18 months before he arrived?

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.

Boris over at France This Way writing about the upcoming French elections reminds me that I’m registered to vote here and perhaps I should find out some more about the people who I might be asked to vote for.

Although registered to vote here, I can only vote in the local and European elections, not the national ones that Boris talks about. Still, it’s interesting to read his take on the policies being proposed by the leading candidates.

Sarkozy definitely sounds like the candidate that France needs. Unfortunately, going by past performance he would more than likely back down from his policies in the face of certain public demonstrations against reductions in benefits. Does that mean that France needs Royal with her policies of increasing benefits and just borrowing more and more to pay for it? Boris suggests that getting him elected and driving France to the abyss would get someone strong enough to pull France out of the hole next time around but I don’t think it would: France would just go sailing over the abyss with spiralling unemployment as it became too expensive to employ people and too difficult to entice people to work anyway when the benefits were so high.

I for one would be quite happy to remain unemployed until retirement age if I was getting paid 90% of what I previously earned. After all, that would free me up from the expenses of going to work each day and would almost certainly mean that I’d get more net “pay” than I was before. Why would anyone be daft enough to look for work under those circumstances?

In fact, the only fly in the ointment in this scenario is that France quite clearly doesn’t have enough money to pay for the pensions that it’s contracted to pay for. At present, there doesn’t appear to be any option other than “pay as you go” schemes in France. These are wonderful inventions which mean that as soon as the scheme is introduced all those presently retired get a full pension which is paid for by those currently working. Unfortunately, since they aren’t funded the whole system depends on having a reasonable number of people working for each person retired.

When old age pensions were first introduced in the UK way back in 1908 for over 70s, the average life expectancy was 50 ie most people died before they received their pension. Now though, with life expectancy over 70, most people do receive their pension. So whilst in 1908 it was no problem paying the pensions in that most people didn’t live long enough to get them, now we find taxes increasing more and more to cover pension payments and yet still there is no “money in the pot” to pay for them.

So what will happen in France? I think that regardless of who is elected, social contributions and benefits will remain high because no French polician is prepared to stand up against the certain protests against reducing benefits. So, the country will have to borrow more. That’s not a sustainable strategy and sooner or later the lenders will call a halt. When they do, it will more than likely be catastrophic for France with widespread and substantial cuts in benefits and taxes called for accompanied by privatisation of just about everything I suspect.

The transition year from the tax system of one country to another can cause a number of peculiarities in payment of tax and social security as you’d expect.

For a start, the UK tax year runs from April to March whereas the French one is from January to December and both systems operate on the basis that you’re taxed by tax year. That’s relatively easy to resolve in practice as each country seems to apportion the tax according to when you made the move. What’s much more complex is the social security and healthcare arrangements.

We told the Inland Revenue in March 2004 that we were moving to France in April of that year. In fact, we told them twice in March as we wanted to register as overseas landlords (we’re renting out our UK property). Then we told them twice more in April that we had moved and indeed started getting letters directly to our French address. Snag is, that they continued to send letters to our UK address, my parents address and even my work address!

As you can imagine, we were quite busy for the first few months so it was June before we thought we’d have another go and told them yet again that we were here, twice more in fact. Finally on the seventh attempt they decided that we owed them over £500 as we’d not told them that we’d moved!

How come?

Well, the seven times that we told them we moved break down as follows:

1. in March and April 2004 we told our own Inland Revenue tax office;

2. in March and April 2004 we told the Inland Revenue “landlord abroad” people;

3. in June we told the Inland Revenue Child Benefit people; and

4. in June and July we told the Inland Revenue Tax Credit people.

In fact, we originally thought that telling just our own tax office was enough in that they use the same reference number for us as all the other Inland Revenue offices. So it should, but the problem is that the other offices were just lumped into Inland Revenue piecemeal within the last few years and integration between them is virtually zero at the moment. Even so, you’d think that telling our own offce twice was enough but in fact they still send letters to me at our previous address, my former work address and here, seemingly at random and it’s been over two years now since we made the move.

After yet another “pay up or else” notice in 2005, we wrote them a letter running through the sheer number of times we’d told them (and legally, we only needed to tell them once!). That at least resulted, eventually, in an apology and confirmation that we don’t owe them anything.

And yet, within the last week Wendy received another “pay up or else” letter. Funnilly enough the very same envelope contained a letter saying that she didn’t owe anything. Both signed by the same person!

Still, at least they’ve worked out that she’s living here. Where they sent my copy of the same letter (they always come in pairs) is anyones’ guess.