A week from today the French people will elect the right man as president and it will do no good. Mathew Parris (whose name is not exactly a pun), explains why in the London Times. The French desperately need their own Margret Thatcher: someone who will dismantle their dysfunctional welfare state and expose the economy to shock treatment. It worked for the English, in 1979. But it won't work for the French, not yet.
The Britain I remember in 1979 had that impatience. It would be wrong to say the Tories had persuaded the country of Thatcherism – we hardly knew what that was – but of one thing we were sufficiently persuaded: that the old way wasn’t working, wouldn’t work, and had to be abandoned. In the air was a hatred and fear of the trade unions, a detestation of suffocating state bureaucracy, and a furious contempt for the incompetence of nationalised industries and utilities. Britain, it seemed to many of us, was sick, and might even be dying.
I don’t think France is anywhere near that state of mind. I don’t think France is ready. I don’t sniff in the wind in la France profonde (though I begin to in urban Paris) that palpable sense of having reached the end of a road. The changes France needs to embrace will be convulsive. The pain will be intense, the dislocation bewildering and cruel. We British found that when Thatcherism arrived. But even at the low point of Thatcher’s first term, even when she personally had become a figure of loathing across much of Britain, you almost never heard anyone suggest a return to what had gone before.
The British were ready to rationalize their economy in 1979. Almost ten years later I spent a week in Oxford, England. In addition to learning that I could drink one pint of bitter every two hours and still stay sober enough to visit the museums, I witnessed the Thatcherite economic revival. Everywhere you looked everything was being rebuilt. Everything was buzzing with energy. The old bull dog had come out of its socialist hibernation.
On the other hand, I could see that it was still a less competitive economy than the U.S. At 11 pm there were maybe three thousand Italian and German teens on the streets of Oxford, all of them trying to crowd into just three open businesses: McDonalds, Burger King, and Kentucky Fried Chicken. No indigenous British business would stoop to keep its doors open for that market.
A few years ago I attended a speech by former PM John Major at Augustana College. He told a revealing story about democratic culture in Britain. He was walking in the British countryside with Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev when the Russian became thirsty. They rapped on the door of a pub, which was closed, as pubs back then were, for several hours every afternoon. As Gorbachev rattled the door he yelled: "Let me in, I'm the President of Russia." A voice from inside responded: "I don't care if you're the bleedin' Czar. We're closed!" It's hard not to admire that kind of stiff necked independence, a bit.
The French are still stubbornly refusing to open the doors of their economy, even though conditions inside the Republic are becoming more and more dire. Parris doesn't think Paris is yet ready to come out of hibernation. I suspect he is right.
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