Daffodils and Privatisation

Daffodils
I have just arrived back from a week in England to find the plants in my garden really starting to move and the coronilla in bloom already. It seems the weather has been fine while I was away. Not that it was bad in England, although with too many overcast days. I think of the spring being earlier here than in England but it isn't really; much the same plants are blooming on both sides of the channel.

One difference I noticed is the sheer quantity of daffodils blooming in England. Here there are plenty but not the great swathes of them growing round the village pond in Chiddingfold and in front of my mother's kitchen window. And |I noticed a difference between them and those remembered from when I was a child. The memory is admittedly vague but I recall daffodils always being a fairly deep shade of yellow; the flowers with white petals were narcissi, invariably with an orange centre. Looking closely at the daffodils in Chiddingfold I could see hardly any that were purely of the deep yellow shade I remember. There was a huge range of variation in the colours and shapes. Obviously, bulb growers will have indulged in hybridisation in the interim but this is the first time I had really noticed the extent of it. It's enormous.

Another point that interested me occurred on the Saturday morning when a sharp frost preceded a warm sunny day. The daffodils outside my mother's kitchen were all flat on the ground when I got up, as though somebody had stamped all over them. As the sun got to them they all gradually rose up to their former positions. I wondered why. There was no ice on the flowers to weigh them down and, if any freezing had occurred, I would have expected the opposite reaction: up, stiff when frozen and collapsed when thawed. I asked several people but the only possible explanation came from my daughter who suggested that if the frost was an air frost the flowers had moved down to escape it. I suppose that is possible but it somehow seems unlikely. It's a mystery to be unravelled sometime.

Privatisation
One thing I did while in England was to get a mobile phone. I generally hate the things (or rather the manners of a lot of their users) but realise that there are situations when one would be very useful. So I planned to get one on a pay-as-you-go basis for use in emergencies only. The problem here is that all top-ups for pay-as-you-go contracts last just a short time. A 10 euro top-up, for instance, is valid for only two weeks; if you don't use the 10 euros in that time you lose them. Effectively, it costs >250 euros a year to keep the phone running. So I got a UK contract which will cost a lot for each call when I use it here but, if as intended, I hardly ever use it, will be a lot cheaper than a French contract.

This is one result of the differences in privatisation between France and the UK. I think that privatisation of telephony in the UK has been a success (one of the few to date). In France, a grudging and primarily theoretical liberalisation has allowed France Telecom and its subsidiary Orange to create a virtual monopoly. The result is that the consumer has very little choice.

Privatisation (and foreign ownership) is even more controversial here than in England. My own view is that it can work well if genuine competition is possible and there is the means and will to enforce it. The French, on the whole, simply don't want it and often point to some disasters in England (e.g. rail) to support their views. Distribution of electricity and gas is a privatisation that may turn out to work well in England (I think the jury is currently out on that) and there is a law going through parliament in France to, theoretically, do the same. This move, known as the NOME law, is supposed to meet a Brussels directive but is really more of a twitch than a nod towards privatisation. The French are dead set against it and think it will simply fail and result in higher prices. I think they are right, because of the way the law has been drawn up. It allows for privatisation of only 25% of distribution; state-backed EDF must retain 75%. This ensures that even if just one competitor secures the full 25% available, it will never be big enough to challenge EDF. More than one competitor would simply make the alternatives even weaker. It's really a move to appease Brussels while keeping the state monopoly.

The outcry against the NOME law echoes similar protests against, for instance, a noticeable number of successful Polish plumbers and English ski instructors in France; taking French jobs, for Heaven's sake! So much for freedom of movement. The French tendency to protectionism is well know but there is a surprise in all this. I think that partial privatisation of the NHS in the UK would be a disaster but the French have one of the best healthcare systems in the world and it is all privatised and affordable; and the French would, as ever, be the last to sanction any change.