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.
