Another Letter On The French: Government

Government And Administration

There are obvious differences between the two countries in terms of procedure but also differences in approach and culture that can be easily discerned. The most glaringly obvious is that England is a constitutional monarchy and France a republic. In England the monarch is little more than a figurehead; in France the President has significant power. England has a first-past-the-post electoral system, France has multi-round voting. A common English misconception is that France relies on proportional representation but this in fact plays a very minor role in the French electoral system. Those are major differences but their necessary consequences are far from obvious. So let’s dig a little deeper.

Disagreements occur in all cultures but one in England might result in a letter to The Times whilst one in France is more likely to result in a pile of cauliflowers dumped in front of a Mairie or a blockade of a motorway. If the French are unhappy with the government they will generally make that clear in rather less gentlemanly ways than the English. The French know what a revolution can achieve and they are not about to let a government forget it.

I have often wondered how the French can be both bureaucratic and anarchic at the same time but somehow they manage it. Some friends of mine, applying successfully for a carte de séjour, were told by the civil servant involved: now you have a file; in France, if you have no file you don’t exist. In England, if the government has a file on you are probably a criminal or a suspected terrorist. In England, the letter of the law is the law (before Boris Johnson arrived on the scene). In France…….I wanted to plant some flowers opposite my house, across the road, between two trees, but it meant digging up the hard core at the roadside. I asked my neighbours whether I should ask the Mairie for permission to do this and they all said: No, you will never get permission. But we all love the idea so just do it, move the bench from further down the road to between the two trees so that cars can’t park there, do it, we all love the idea and so nobody will say anything. In France you need the official documents unless all in your locality like what you are doing, in which case f**k the rules.: It’s a very pragmatic approach to initiatives but also leads to the dreaded “saut du loup”: the occasion on which someone sees an opportunity to get one back on you or achieve something by reporting you to the authorities.

That is mostly at local level and levels matter. At the top level the English tend to pride themselves on being the birthplace (Magna Carta etc) of democracy and the best exponents of it. But are they? The English extol the virtues of their electoral system on the grounds that, if you have complaint against the government you know who to take it to: your MP; the MP is then under an implied threat to lose a vote if he/she doesn’t react appropriately. But how often in practice do people appeal to their MP and how much does an MP care about a single vote?

In France you don’t have that single source for a resolution of your problem but you do have sources, dependent on the level of your complaint. That could be the Mairie, the Communauté de Communes, the Département or the region but the sources are there. It is an English myth that without an MP you don’t have someone to complain to.

Moreover, in an English general election the principle that the political party with the majority of votes, on the basis of one person one vote should win, fails and has done. A majority of voters can vote for the political party that loses the election. In France, it is much more likely that no single party wins power in an election but that some coalition takes power. In England a coalition government is often regarded as a failure of the election or the political parties involved, possibly leading to dreaded political/economic instability and stalemate on decision-making. in France it is simply a reflection of the mood of the country and has few other connotations. Coalitions are accepted as normal. I remember a time in the 1960s/1970s when Belgium was ridiculed in the English press because the Belgian government seemed to change coalitions about every six months. Yet over the same period the Belgian economy outstripped that of England by a very considerable margin.

Democracy and its consequences is not all about one person one vote; indeed, in respect of other requisites in terms of independence of and respect for the judiciary, respect for independent sources of information and individual rights England currently does not show up well. In England with its first past the post system, if you vote for a losing candidate your vote is totally discounted. In France’s multi-round system, your vote is still counted if your favoured candidate loses the first round and may be important in the next round.

Within all this is the cost of administration, which must be paid for one way or another by the inhabitants of the country, the so- called tax burden. In very general terms the more granular an administration, the more layers of administration, the better it can serve local needs but the greater the cost. I don’t have figures but the tax burden seems obviously greater in France than in England. This begs two important questions: on whom, proportionately does the tax burden fall and whom, proportionately, does it benefit?

Several more differences come to mind. In England there is a strict separation of the military from the police, the former being under the control of the Ministry of Defence and the latter under the Home Office. In France the gendarmerie and the CRS have both civil and military roles. The judiciary as well as the legal codes differ. I don’t intend to go into the differences in legal code but it is worth noting that neither side in judicial disputes in England has responsibility for establishing the truth. Rather, cases are fought in a manner analogous to former duels but with words as weapons. In France an investigating magistrate is appointed with the specific responsibility of establishing the truth.

As a final point, a point that is also discussed in the letter on business, there is also the question of which services/businesses should be run by the government and which run by private organisations. At the moment the tendency in England is towards privatising almost everything that can be privatised. In France there is much more inclination to have many services/businesses run or at least tightly controlled by the state. Over the past several decades England has tended to favour private enterprise over state ownership or control. There has been little movement in this direction in France over the same period.