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.

 

Style And Psychology

Gardening Style

I think I’ve commented before on contrasting gardening styles in England and France, the French preference for geometric patterns and discipline and the English preference for a ùore natural arrangement. One neighbour called my back garden a jungle and another a “ savante désordre”. The difference is just in stylistic appreciation.

The same is true in the allotments. Those French who are taking them seriously have much more orderly arrangements than mine but also much more barren ground. The peasant in me says “but you could grow a a lot more in all that space” despite the fact that we all grow a lot more than we need individually. Nature abhors a vacuum. The French-owned allotments have plants mostly arranged in lines and wide apart while I tend to plant in clumps and, if a useful plant, aflower or vegetable, sprouts somewhere I haven’t planted it, I leave it to grow there. Poppies have sprouted in various places from the seeds I gathered and scattered last year, as also have a couple of Californian poppies. In amongst the rows of potatoes I planted I have sunflowers, borage and lettuces growing from seeds self-sown from last year. Does it matter, does it offend? I don’t know but I can foresee some exchange of views ahead. Rather smugly I think that I will have a greater variety of plants in my allotment than anyone else. But does that matter? It’s simply a question of point of view and aesthetic appreciation. Whatever our points of view we’ll all get some satisfaction from our efforts and more vegetables than we need. I give my excess to friends and to the Bar du Pont for whoever wants it. I grow it simply because I like to.

Water

“Water, water, everywhere and not a drop to drink…..”. Well we do have drinking water but also a great deal more, which is unusual in these parts at this time of the year. The weather has been almost tropical, like English April weather on steroids: downpours and hot sunny intervals, frequent storms. It was estimated a few months ago that France needed two months of rain to reach normal levels of precipitation and, though we haven’t had the floods that Italy has I think we are well on the way to achieving that. Last summer we had restrictions on water use and the supply to the wash-house opposite me, which I use to water the plants in front of the house, was cut off. It still hasn’t been restored but I’m hoping that we will soon have enough for that to happen.

Provençal Psychology.

An important part of living here is understanding Provençal psychology. There seems to be a directive that you do not offend anyone if you can help it. So if you ask something of anyone, some kind of service, they do not want to say no; in effect to offend. It could be a routine service, a local plumber, an electrician or whatever but, if they don’t want the job, they will not say no they will simply not turn up when they say they will. So it is important to understand that non-appearance is equivalent to a “no”. In effect you are invited to look elsewhere for a solution to your problem, which obviously you can do. But…...you have to understand that that is the situation, yourself; nobody is going to tell you that that is the reality.

This occurred to me on one one occasion when one regular boules player in the village pissed off all the others and so the others all sought to play elsewhere. My response was to tell the others to tell this player to play elsewhere. But…….this was apparently not possible (I didn’t understand why at the time). Now I know that this would have created offence and that was why it was not possible. The problem resolved itself only when the offending player no longer came to play, because there were no other players to play with. So for a while no boules was played in the village. The message was clear but only implied, not stated. Eventually, when the offending player had understood the message or got frustrated, boules in the village resumed. All things come to those who wait?

 

On Being Franglais

On Being Franglais

Becoming officially both French and English has made me ponder to what extent I am either. The thought has been accentuated by the fact that both of my closest English friends will shortly be joining the general post-Brexit exodus of English people from the area. I shall then be one of only two Brits in the village and the other I hardly know; he doesn’t participate in village life. In most ex-pat communities I have observed, the English remain primarily and essentially English, however they interact with the native population; is that true o me too?

By upbringing I am certainly English. By education I am primarily English but a slight mixture, schooled in England but predominantly studying French. When I was young I didn’t allow foreigners to criticise my country; I had to defend it, a reflection of my nationalist education. Now I dislike all forms of nationalism.

By culture I am a mixture too, enjoying English and French music, films and literature equally. By language I am definitely English; my understanding and mastery of French is good but will never be as good as that of my English. By experience I must definitely be English, having lived over 60 years of my life there, even though I have travelled extensively.

By lifestyle I think I am decidedly more French than English. I particularly love food, wine and humour; someone once wrote that the French at play are a gladdening sight and I would heartily endorse that. Certainly I seem to have avoided the English Calvinist tendencies which seem life-denying to me.

So what is it I most appreciate about each country? I can’t separate the people in general because they are just that: people in general. I also have the problem in making a comparison in that most of my life in England was spent working; I was retired in England for only a few years and decided almost immediately that I wanted then to live in France. So my experience here has been just in retirement. Throughout my life I have had French friends, felt at home in France and empathised with typically French attitudes.

Having decided to live in France, what do I miss about England? There isn’t much. True I would see more of my family if I were in England but they have their own, mostly busy lives,so my contact though more frequent would always be brief and peripheral. We can and do visit one another. In spring I miss the deciduous woods that I loved in England at that time of year and that are not present in my part of France. I also miss uniquely English pubs occasionally and a pint of good bitter but that is about it.

Against that my friends in England were far between and here they are close at hand. Here I experience a strong sense of community, which I value and never experienced in England after my very early years. I’m not sure whether that is a function of living in a small village rather than living in France but one of the most commonly used French words is “solidarité, getting together, supporting one another to achieve things. It reinforces the sense of community.

Politically I am not enamoured of either government though certainly very much less so of the current English one. The French government has lurched to the right following the prevailing trend in Europe but still takes better care of the elderly and those on modest incomes, like me, than does the current English government.

How to sum up? Maybe it is just a matter of attitude and preferences. I certainly believe I am happier now in France now than I would be in England. Whether that makes me more French than English I am not sure. If someone were to ask me whether I was English or French I’m not sure either how I would answer.. Saying Franglais would be a cop out. Maybe I would say that I was not sure but that I was certainly European. That is obvious geographically but to the extent that England has distanced itself from Europe via Brexit it probably makes me more French than English.

 

The Coronation And Gardening

 

The Coronation

Yes, I watched the coronation on TV, or at least a little over an hour of it. I couldn’t be quite as cynical as Private Eye which previewed the event as “man on chair, puts hat on”. I thought the ceremony and views of London and Westminster Abbey would at least be worth it and so they were. I had hoped to see Charles crowned but had been invited to lunch at 1.00 ( CET) and so just missed that. My impressions then are just of what for an hour or so went before.

In truth I found the ceremony rather boringly slow and I really didn’t want to know such details as which trousers Charles was wearing. The gospel singers were an innovation but (cynically) a sop to the black community? There was a reference to “people of all faiths”, an inclusivity, that seemed subsequently drowned out by numerous insistences on protestantism. OK, the Church of England is protestant but is it necessary to ram that down the throats of people of other faiths? How well does that help the delicate situation in Northern Ireland and do we want to feed religious strife?

In all this I wonder about the involvement of various parties, who has the most influence and the final say. The government, the military and the clergy obviously have major roles in the organisation and pageantry of the event, the traditional procedures. But what about, beyond that, the messaging? Sunak was quick to say that the event showed the great in Great Britain but any politician can be expected to put some political spin on the occasion. However I am led to question just how much input the government can have on what is supposed to be very much a non-political occasion. If I’m suspicious it’s because the current government has shown that it has little respect for established standards of parliamentary behaviour and even legality, so what else may it trample on?

Anyway, Charles has been crowned king and I wish him goodwill. A good king is certainly better than a bad one and if he carries out his office as well as his mother he will be judged a good king. Going by his past record, his sympathies would seem to be to the nation’s benefit but whether he will be allowed to express them and whether he can use them to influence the government in his decreed non-political role remains to be seen

Flowers And Vegetables

The weather being particularly clement I have left my bedroom windows open. The honeysuckle rambling outside r immediately took the opportunity to ramble into the room (as in photo) and is now perfuming all the house. It is now in bloom on both sides of the house, top to bottom. The lilac by the front door is in bloom too. The jasmine one floor up has yet to bloom so I’m looking forward to a perfumed summer.

The front of the house is looking good, fully planted and people stopping to take photos, particularly of the Dublin Bay roses on both sides of the road. The one opposite (in photo) has previously been just a bush but seems to have broken through the hard core on the roadise beceause it is now way up the lime tree beside it. I think the front is is largely done, barring renewal of the hanging baskets. The back needs a little attention but is mostly planted with perennials so not much is needed.

A lot of the

allotment is already planted but I have to dig up the remains of the spinach beet from last year and the last few leeks. I’ll hold off on the garlic I planted last autumn for at least another month. Corn, spinach beet and tomato seedlings are on the way but I have yet to get the beans going and will need to repeat the sowing of lettuces and radishes. The potatoes, onions, lettuces, beetroot and herbs already planted are looking healthy.

On the fence around one side of the plot I’ve planted three honeysuckle rooted cuttings, eight forsythia cuttings and four grape vines. Hopefully they will cover the fence next year if not this. The gooseberry and thornless blackberry bushes look healthy and hopefully will deliver in due course. A great deal though will depend on water usage restrictions over the summer.

The mad English gardener, who also plays boules, strikes again! And I have my “crown” at the Rémuzat tournament I won last year to defend in September. So, enough to keep me occupied.

April, Education, Mice And Men

April

I’ve always loved April, the month that for me means spring, puts a spring in my step and a song in my heart. It’s the time when gardening in earnest can really begin and, here, when locally grown asparagus and strawberries abound in the shops and markets. Cantaloupe melons are appearing in the shops too, from Spain at the moment but locally grown ones will appear within a couple of weeks also. It’s the start of a local fruit bonanza that will last into September. And I’m a fruit-aholic.

I’ve not yet done any planting of summer flowers in front of my house but the allotment has kept me quite busy. White onions, lettuces, potatoes and radishes are all in and sprouting as well as the sunflowers with which I want to completely surround my plot. The rest will be planted in the next couple of weeks. As no one has claimed the fence bordering one side of the plot I’ve planted eight forsythia cuttings and three honeysuckle cuttings alongside it. I’ll take more cuttings in the next few weeks which hopefully can be planted in the autumn. It’s go, go, go.

Education

So what do you think education is about, what is part of it, what negates it? I think that tick boxes, as part of any evaluation negates it. Think about that. Tick boxes are antithetical to education and yet they are widely used to evaluate it. How can that be?

Just consider this. How many times have you seen the virtue of thinking “outside the box” as having produced a new insight, a breakthrough on a problem, an advance in knowledge? I think it has has happened quite frequently. Just as one instance, Einstein’s theory of relativity couldn’t have happened without it. Einstein couldn’t have had that insight without thinking outside the box. But, educated today, Einstein wouldn’t have been allowed that insight, he would have been marked down, as less intelligent, because of it.

So why are tick boxes used to evaluate education? It seems fairly obvious to me that it is because they make education (and teachers) esay to evaluate, which happens to be very important to politicians, particularly useful in fooling the public into believing that education levels are maintained or increased while budgets are cut.

Of Mice And Men

My French friends are puzzled about the English; they think we have changed in personality. The French have for long regarded the English as “bagareurs”, always ready for an argument, a, fight, stubborn, perfidious. Isn’t that what saved Britain in WW2?S o they look at what has been happening in England and scratch their heads and think “Why isn’t London burning? We know the English can be taciturn but have they all become mice?”. If the same had been happening in France the guillotines would already have been dusted off and wagon loads of MPs would be on their way to meet their maker. The price of electricity is soaring in England; here the price rise is capped at 15%, raised from 4%. Inflation of food prices isreported as 17% in Britain, here it is just above the general inflation level of 5.7%. And the French are up in arms about the price rises. A proposal to raise the retirement age to 3 years lower than the British retirement age has already seen Paris burning in parts. Why isn’t this happening in London?

So the French ask:what has happened to the English?Mice or men? Was Macron right when he called Brexit the vassalisation of the English?

 

Brexit Revisited

Brexit Revisited

At the risk of revisiting territory already covered in the past, provoked by issues I am still discussing with friends and acquaintances, I want to provide a definitive statement of my attitude to Brexit.

Referenda are a legitimate democratic mechanism, used by many countries as a part of their democratic constitution, with a specific purpose and rules to achieve that purpose. The purpose is to get a direct reading of opinion/desires from the electorate unfiltered by intermediaries such as elected representatives. To this end two of the rules are that the electorate must be properly informed and the result must be decisive: the government is looking for a directive. Thus any misinformation in referenda campaigns must be heavily penalised and may invalidate the result and a threshold is imposed on the winning result margin, often 60% but which may be less. A result of 2-3% either way is interpreted as the electorate being more or less evenly split, unable to make up its mind and therefore offering no clear direction to the government. The referendum result is thus null. Other normal electoral regulations apply.

None of this applied to the UK EU referendum; all the normal referenda and electoral rules were broken and what ensued was akin to a rugby scrum without even rugby rules. Any country that uses referenda responsibly would have declared the result invalid. I therefore regard the UK EU referendum as having no legitimacy at all and very far from having any kind of binding commitment on the government.

So what was it all about? Here I think we have to separate the promoters and the voters. What the promoters had in common was that they were all rich and powerful or represented those who were. And they were faced with a stated EU intention to bring in legislation to crack down on tax avoidance. For the promoters there was the incentive to avoid this legislation and also to repeal many EU laws, such as on food, environmental standards and worker rights, that inhibited profits. Easy money and low tax were the goals, I think. What do current events suggest?

 However, those goals were hardly likely to appeal to the electorate at large What was needed for an effective referendum campaign were populist slogans, appeals to nationalism and a false idea of sovereignty. This was exactly the problem faced by Goebbels in Germany prior to 1933 and may explain why analogies to him and Nazi measures are sometimes applied to the current UK government. The Leave campaign adopted very similar arguments to those of Goebbels, slogans and superficially attractive sound bites, denial of reality and appeals to wish fulfilment, albeit without the overt racism. The jews as a target were simply replaced by the EU.

 Finally there was the UK’ endemic xenophobia. Foreigners and what is foreign are widely regarded with suspicion and distaste and the Leave campaign ramped up the xenophobia., particularly over the issue of immigration: immigration=foreigners=bad. In fact the UK needs immigrants because of its ageing population, in common with most developed western countries, and is in reality in competition with those other countries for the most needed immigrant skills. So ùmaking immigrants unwelcome is a clear own goal.

Economically Brexit makes no sense since it reversed the economic reasons for the original decision to join the EU when the same economic consitions applied as in 1972. The decision to join was because the economy was in poor shape and the UK was doing much more business with the EU with tariff barriers against it than it was with the Commonwealth countries with no such barriers. Joining the EU removed those barriers and boosted trade. Trade requires a correspondence of interests and the UK thaan had more with the EU than with the Commonwealth, as it still does today The UK joined the EU for economic reasons, not political ones, and has left for political reasons,no wonder trade is now suffering.

So how did it work? From subsequent anecdotal evidence the appeal to a distorted understanding of sovereignty worked best, the idea that the UK alone could not just control but impose its destiny on the world: take back cpntrol was the slogan. There was also the appeal to funds for the NHS which many people apparently believed; from an overtly rich, right-wing group traditionally opposed to spending on public services? And appeal to many in small but significant professions who felt undervalued by their allotment in the EU, such as fishermen and farmers. EU allotments in other areas, such as economically deprived areas, were simply countered by empty promises, empty as has proved to be the case.

So the campaign worked. Should I therefore regard it bas binding? I can’t for the life of me regard it as in any way legitimate, as anything other than a travesty of democracy and a farce. It would seem to have resulted in a mountain of problems, of chaos; and that is what, if we had given it real informed thought, we should reasonably have expected.

Reason, however, is not the order of the day, emotions that have been evoked are still alive and it seems that the major political parties in the Uk are wary of them. By far the largest and most influential part of the media in the UK is determined to keep the Brexit fantasy alive; even that national institution, globally respected hitherto as independent, the BBC, is apparently willing to compromise, to compromise not only its independence but also its global reputation.

So what of the future? Reality has already bitten, and bitten bitterly for many. Will Britain, and its political parties, face up to reality or continue to pander to fantasy?

 

Think

Think

Think was apparently at one time the watch word within IBM when that company was the dominant force in the IT world. I don’t know how well that worked for the company but I believe it should be the watch word for everybody today.

I recently had an article published in a reputable English IT journal but had difficulty trying to access the published article. There had been recurring problems, the journal admitted, over access for new subscribers (not financial, subscription is free). I took a look and the soution became immediately clear and my problem was resolved. I passed the problem resolution on to the journal. So, no problem?

Well, my background is in IT and when I retired many ears ago one of the great benefits I felt was that I no longer had to try to keep up to date with new software releases. It used to take me at least half a day a week to do that when I was working. So I am well out of date on new software and quite generally on new developments in IT. Yet I easily found the problem with this website when their own IT personnel, who must have been much more up to date than I was and much more familiar with their website , apparently couldn’t. How can that happen?

I believe it’s to do with thinking, not rocket science, just ordinary but rigourous thinking. The article I wrote focussed on the importance of what I knew as the ELSE clause, part of a logical construction used in programs of my day: IF, THEN, ELSE. IF (whatever) occurred/applied, THEN all possible reactions, ELSE because you are not God and may have overlooked some possibilities. As I understood it, even if you were totally, absolutely sure you had covered all possibilities in your THEN clause, thinking as hard as you could, you still had to include an ELSE. And it’s the ELSE clause that is so often missing today.

Why? Is it because people (and specifically IT employeees today) are not encouraged to think for themselves? That’s a possibility, though a damning one if it is true.

The other more general possibility lies in education. If you want to judge levels of education by numbers, as governments increasingly seem to want to do, geerally for political purposes, you use tick boxes. They are easy to mark, right or wrong and you can count the numbers. Tick boxes force a limited number of possible responses. So how can anyone think outside the (tick) box?

If you are not allowed/educated to do so you don’t. So how do we bring up people to think independently, out of the box?

There’s an awful corollary. Could it be that governments don’t want people to think out of the box but only within the constraints that they have decided? If that is true we need revolutionaries as never before.