A Year in Provence Duex - Why we should all vote Labour
Discussion
Having spent the last few months in France, a country I do actually enjoy being in, I have decided that come the next election in the UK I will vote for Gordon Brown.
Obviously not because I think he's any good as a Prime Minister, or indeed because I think anything about the Labour party is worthy of support from a reasonable person. In fact quite the opposite. I would ultimately like the Labour party to be destroyed permanently and forever, and deemed beyond the pale in the way that the British Unions of Fascists was. This should have happened in the 1950s when the rotten Atlee government extended war time rationing because they liked the idea of planning our economic lives for us. It definitely should have happened in the late 70s when their cretinous ideas brought the country to it's knees.
The trouble is both times it was saved by having a Tory government who basically steadied the ship. Thatchers deregulations while very worthwhile were not actually that radical. The NHS, the BBC, student grants and all kinds of other things survived untouched, meaning that when Labour came back to power the seeds were already sewn to expand and expand these things the the sorry state we're in now.
By 1979 the Labour party had done enough to make corrective action acceptable but not enough to make it popular, and not to the point where really drastic action was forced on Britain.
Where does France fit in? It's even worse here.
Basically France spent the 1980s doing exactly the opposite of the UK. Mitterand nationalised things, raised minimum wage and was basically a socialist. It was all probably more marginal than the UK since 1997 because the president was restrained by a parliament, but none the less, you can see that development stopped here about the time of the 1987 downturn, and never really recovered. Low birth rate, huge unemployment, crumbling houses, old cars, no young people. The jobs that do exist are low skilled, low paid and keenly fought for meaning the people doing them are capable of much more given the opportunity, and offer absolutely no possible prospect of advancement in anything like a sensible time frame. Basically you would have to be minimum 50 to get to be a store manager at Intermarche, and that's only if someone from Paris or Marsailles doesn't decide to go into semi retirement here when he's 45.
As well many people know, London, Switzerland and other places around the world are full of French people who, like many English people now feel that their career and their lives will be better outside of France.
We went out to a restaurtant last night which just epitomised this. Brilliant setting for a restaurant in an old cobbled town square in a near by town, which is a pleasant market town, plenty of parking etc. Lovely warm Thursday evening, and it's still school holidays here. We got there just before 9 and they were closing up. There was one other table occupied by a late 30s looking couple. This is the sort of place that would have been heaving if it was in Guildford, or Bristol. The couple on other table left fairly soon after in a Paris registered car. I would guess they were passing through on route to the south coast.
The food was brilliant, the price was reasonable if not cheap, but simply because of where it is they couldn't have given good food and wine away. There's no one to give it away to. This town, and towns like it all over France are simply dying because of this. There was a waitress and a cook and the endless social security contributions that go with this, running a kitchen doesn't come cheap, electricity and so forth. So even if their rent was zero, this restaurant simply must be making a loss.
Frankly even with their insane plan of filling the country up with African immigrants, they are not going to be able to reverse this decline on the simple demographic fact that France is not making enough French people to keep going. There probably aren't even enough immigrants because while benefits might be fairly generous, really how many people will make the journey to France just to live on benefits. Despite what the Daily Mail might say, most north Africans have designs on some sort of employment.
This collapse in birth rate must at least partly be caused by the fact that no one is earning enough to comfortably support children, no one is confident that they will be richer next year, and no one believes that their children growing up here would have any realistic chance of living an enjoyable life in a dying, bankrupt community. Add in the fact that state benefits and education programmes designed to hide unemployment mean that most people don't leave education until they're 30, and then do their travelling, bumming about and the other sort of stuff that I'm getting a bit tired of now, and it's even bleaker.
Because Chirac won the 1995 election and did just a few small reforms, and partly because they weren't able to inflate this crap away due to meeting the criteria for joining the Euro, France has been able to grind along with it's staggering unemployment, under employment and chronic waste of resources for another decade, and because so many people are now in the pay of the state, even Sarkozy with his grand plans for being the French Thatcher is finding even modest cuts impossible.
Because it has good hospitals, cheap houses in the country and nice quiet towns it's seen as a good place to retire or own a holiday home, so that any decent new cars you do see round here are from Paris, or more likely still Holland or England. The problem is made worse still by having these people here because they actually think it's ok to run a cafe for a hobby but not make more than a bit of pocket money and some local friends.
It would have actually been much better for France to have elected another Socialist in 1995, to have failed the Euro criteria, to have gone all the way to the bottom and had crumbling roads, overcrowded hospitals and mass exoduses of people abroad. It would have meant that in 2002 they could have elected someone willing and able to actually do what is needed, and it would have meant that the angry, impoverished people would have supported them.
Cameron is not even a Thatcher. He is a Chirac through and through, an establishment man who will do the bare minimum necessary to rumble along, he will cut the worst excesses of Environmental Counselling Co-ordinators and grotesque government waste, but he won't bring in the deep rooted reforms that are necessary to actually change the country fundamentally from one where people believe the state owes them a living to one that resents state interference in their affairs. Not to undermine the good work Thatcher did, but she ultimately failed in this because the answers weren't so obviously slapping us in the face that they were unavoidable to the dumbest chav on the council estate.
Obviously not because I think he's any good as a Prime Minister, or indeed because I think anything about the Labour party is worthy of support from a reasonable person. In fact quite the opposite. I would ultimately like the Labour party to be destroyed permanently and forever, and deemed beyond the pale in the way that the British Unions of Fascists was. This should have happened in the 1950s when the rotten Atlee government extended war time rationing because they liked the idea of planning our economic lives for us. It definitely should have happened in the late 70s when their cretinous ideas brought the country to it's knees.
The trouble is both times it was saved by having a Tory government who basically steadied the ship. Thatchers deregulations while very worthwhile were not actually that radical. The NHS, the BBC, student grants and all kinds of other things survived untouched, meaning that when Labour came back to power the seeds were already sewn to expand and expand these things the the sorry state we're in now.
By 1979 the Labour party had done enough to make corrective action acceptable but not enough to make it popular, and not to the point where really drastic action was forced on Britain.
Where does France fit in? It's even worse here.
Basically France spent the 1980s doing exactly the opposite of the UK. Mitterand nationalised things, raised minimum wage and was basically a socialist. It was all probably more marginal than the UK since 1997 because the president was restrained by a parliament, but none the less, you can see that development stopped here about the time of the 1987 downturn, and never really recovered. Low birth rate, huge unemployment, crumbling houses, old cars, no young people. The jobs that do exist are low skilled, low paid and keenly fought for meaning the people doing them are capable of much more given the opportunity, and offer absolutely no possible prospect of advancement in anything like a sensible time frame. Basically you would have to be minimum 50 to get to be a store manager at Intermarche, and that's only if someone from Paris or Marsailles doesn't decide to go into semi retirement here when he's 45.
As well many people know, London, Switzerland and other places around the world are full of French people who, like many English people now feel that their career and their lives will be better outside of France.
We went out to a restaurtant last night which just epitomised this. Brilliant setting for a restaurant in an old cobbled town square in a near by town, which is a pleasant market town, plenty of parking etc. Lovely warm Thursday evening, and it's still school holidays here. We got there just before 9 and they were closing up. There was one other table occupied by a late 30s looking couple. This is the sort of place that would have been heaving if it was in Guildford, or Bristol. The couple on other table left fairly soon after in a Paris registered car. I would guess they were passing through on route to the south coast.
The food was brilliant, the price was reasonable if not cheap, but simply because of where it is they couldn't have given good food and wine away. There's no one to give it away to. This town, and towns like it all over France are simply dying because of this. There was a waitress and a cook and the endless social security contributions that go with this, running a kitchen doesn't come cheap, electricity and so forth. So even if their rent was zero, this restaurant simply must be making a loss.
Frankly even with their insane plan of filling the country up with African immigrants, they are not going to be able to reverse this decline on the simple demographic fact that France is not making enough French people to keep going. There probably aren't even enough immigrants because while benefits might be fairly generous, really how many people will make the journey to France just to live on benefits. Despite what the Daily Mail might say, most north Africans have designs on some sort of employment.
This collapse in birth rate must at least partly be caused by the fact that no one is earning enough to comfortably support children, no one is confident that they will be richer next year, and no one believes that their children growing up here would have any realistic chance of living an enjoyable life in a dying, bankrupt community. Add in the fact that state benefits and education programmes designed to hide unemployment mean that most people don't leave education until they're 30, and then do their travelling, bumming about and the other sort of stuff that I'm getting a bit tired of now, and it's even bleaker.
Because Chirac won the 1995 election and did just a few small reforms, and partly because they weren't able to inflate this crap away due to meeting the criteria for joining the Euro, France has been able to grind along with it's staggering unemployment, under employment and chronic waste of resources for another decade, and because so many people are now in the pay of the state, even Sarkozy with his grand plans for being the French Thatcher is finding even modest cuts impossible.
Because it has good hospitals, cheap houses in the country and nice quiet towns it's seen as a good place to retire or own a holiday home, so that any decent new cars you do see round here are from Paris, or more likely still Holland or England. The problem is made worse still by having these people here because they actually think it's ok to run a cafe for a hobby but not make more than a bit of pocket money and some local friends.
It would have actually been much better for France to have elected another Socialist in 1995, to have failed the Euro criteria, to have gone all the way to the bottom and had crumbling roads, overcrowded hospitals and mass exoduses of people abroad. It would have meant that in 2002 they could have elected someone willing and able to actually do what is needed, and it would have meant that the angry, impoverished people would have supported them.
Cameron is not even a Thatcher. He is a Chirac through and through, an establishment man who will do the bare minimum necessary to rumble along, he will cut the worst excesses of Environmental Counselling Co-ordinators and grotesque government waste, but he won't bring in the deep rooted reforms that are necessary to actually change the country fundamentally from one where people believe the state owes them a living to one that resents state interference in their affairs. Not to undermine the good work Thatcher did, but she ultimately failed in this because the answers weren't so obviously slapping us in the face that they were unavoidable to the dumbest chav on the council estate.
Yes, it has been the case for quite a while that any Frenchman who was prepared to work left the country. Many for London, though they seem to be moving on.
But your idea that another term of NuLabour will demonstrate even to the chavs how bad socialism gets is deeply flawed - with Sky and Stella paid for by someone else, they just don't care. And if the country really does go to thedogs communists, these folk will well up with spite and envy and be glad.
Yes, France is sort of ahead of us on this course. But we are gaining fast. I believe emigration is currently at a record high, here...
But your idea that another term of NuLabour will demonstrate even to the chavs how bad socialism gets is deeply flawed - with Sky and Stella paid for by someone else, they just don't care. And if the country really does go to the
Yes, France is sort of ahead of us on this course. But we are gaining fast. I believe emigration is currently at a record high, here...
grumbledoak said:
Yes, it has been the case for quite a while that any Frenchman who was prepared to work left the country. Many for London, though they seem to be moving on.
But your idea that another term of NuLabour will demonstrate even to the chavs how bad socialism gets is deeply flawed - with Sky and Stella paid for by someone else, they just don't care. And if the country really does go to thedogs communists, these folk will well up with spite and envy and be glad.
Yes, France is sort of ahead of us on this course. But we are gaining fast. I believe emigration is currently at a record high, here...
Are Sky and Stella the TV and beer, or their pikey offspring? But your idea that another term of NuLabour will demonstrate even to the chavs how bad socialism gets is deeply flawed - with Sky and Stella paid for by someone else, they just don't care. And if the country really does go to the
Yes, France is sort of ahead of us on this course. But we are gaining fast. I believe emigration is currently at a record high, here...
I think you have to get to the point where the dole checques actually bounce, where the government cannot pay for these things even if they and everyone else wants them to, to see that the idea is truly ruinous.
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