Conversation with a fisherwoman

Many French fishing ports are unlikely to be affected by Brexit, but Boulogne sur Mer and Dieppe, with only a short strip of water separating them from England, are not among them.They will undoubtedly be the hardest hit. Within a couple of hours of the main wholesale fish market in Paris and catching most of their fish in UK territorial waters, their fishermen are understandably more concerned than most about the looming deadline of January 1^st 2021, when a new deal, or a no deal, with the UK will come into force.

 

Dieppe, where I spent a few days this summer, has definitely seen better days. It is neither the richest nor the most beautiful fishing port in France. Many of its historic buildings were destroyed during the war and rebuilt on a shoestring and according to the aesthetic canons of the 1950s and 60s. Militant dockers and competition from Le Havre, just down the coast, have put paid to its erstwhile lucrative trade in bananas from the French overseas territories. The first building you see walking out of the railway station is a down-at-heel 1960s steel and glass building emblazoned with the name “espace de solidarites” – a brave attempt to bring together in one place all the social services that inhabitants are likely to need. And there are clearly many who do. The sea front is a disappointingly unattractive collection of hotels and residential buildings, ranging from run-down Art Deco to Soviet style concrete blocks that would not look out of place in the drearier suburbs of Prague or Warsaw. The narrow streets just behind them are home to seedy boarding houses for penny-pinching visitors. Being the nearest seaside town to Paris, and the cheapest, it was hardly surprising perhaps that there was a sprinkling of large families of North African origin on the beach, most of the women wearing headscarfs, probably on a short trip from the poorer Northern suburbs of Paris. Just up the road opposite the wharfs where the fishing boats are tied up is the HQ of the constituency MP and former mayor, Sebastien Jumel, one of the 11 members of the dwindling communist group in the Assemblée Nationale. The communist vote has tended to survive in France only in areas of declining industries like mining or fishing and strong working-class traditions. Three of the communist MPs were elected on this stretch of the Normandy coast.

 

To find out how the fishing community was faring just a few months before Brexit actually bites, what better place than the fishermen’s market on the other side of the port? Two stalls were occupied out of a possible total of six and the one I chose had a meagre selection of fish. It was attended by a fisherman and his wife and what I took to be their daughter. The fisherman and his wife were probably not far from retirement and looked drawn and dejected. I bought a couple of fish and turned to the daughter to ask how they felt about the impact of Brexit. She was a tall and broad-shouldered young woman with fair skin and blue eyes, hair tied in knot behind her head, perhaps a far reminiscence of the Normans’ Viking heritage. Unsurprisingly, she had little time for “English” fishermen: they had larger boats, bigger quotas and used aggressive fishing techniques. “We respect our blackout periods and quotas”, she said, heavily implying that the English didn’t, “but if you find scallops in the local supermarkets all the year round”, she went on, “they all come from English boats and are deep frozen”. What did they intend to do if there was no deal on fishing, I asked? “Fight them!” she answered without a moment’s hesitation, “encircle their boats and stop them fishing”. I could imagine her as a passionara in a male dominated world, wielding a battle axe and spurring her troops into battle, in the tradition of the valiant “corsaires” (privateers) and sea captains who sailed from Dieppe in the 17th and 18th centuries to capture and plunder foreign ships or wage war on the English, Dutch and Spanish. A statue of one of the most famous, Abraham Duquesne, stands in a small square behind the sea front that is now a car park.

 

For the moment, the headlines in the Brexit negotiations are focused more on a “level playing field” in state aid to industry than fishing rights, but the issue will undoubtedly return before the negotiations are over, unless of course they break up acrimoniously and a “no deal” is the result. Both sides are being lobbied by their respective fishermen. The industry accounts for little more than 1% of their respective GDPs, although the impact on coastal communities, on both sides, will be greater than this figure suggests. The situation is further complicated by the fact that French, Belgian, Dutch and German vessels take about 70% of their catch in British waters, while British vessels sell about 70% of theirs in continental Europe. In addition, many French trawlers that fish in the North Sea land their catch in Scotland and have it transported by lorry to France through the Chanel tunnel, where it reaches its ultimate markets, tariff and quota free, more quickly than if it were transported by sea.  All in all, a complex system that can only be heavily disrupted by Brexit, like so many others where it is proving necessary, by negotiation or fait accompli, to unpick the threads of a 45-year old trading relationship.

 

It is also worth remembering that in France at least, many fishing ports will not be affected at all. In Southern Brittany and on the Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts, a lot of the fishing is local and most vessels that venture further remain in EU or international waters. The fishermen who sell their catch in our local market twice a week in the Golfe du Morbihan assured me that all their fish comes from French waters that yield a wide range of fish, from the cheaper mackerel, sardines and plaice to the nobler and more expensive species of sole, turbot and sea bass, all of which are snapped up at reasonable prices by local inhabitants and summer visitors. For these fishermen, Brexit is a non-event.

 

But Dieppe is another story altogether. Years of decline and the suspicion that their own authorities are unlikely to go to the barricades to defend their trade give their fisherfolk little hope that they will be offered much more than lump sum payments to scrap most of their boats and take early retirement. After all, this is the procedure that has been followed by all French governments over the years, putting many small coastal fishermen out of business and focusing on the larger and more efficient trawlers that can sail further afield and bring in larger catches. If the Brexit negotiations on fisheries go anywhere, this pattern is likely to be repeated yet again.

 

Little wonder that the older generation of Dieppe fishermen feels dejected – and that the younger generation is spoiling for a fight!

 

 

How green are the French ?

 

On Monday, June 29th, in the immaculately manicured gardens of the Elysée Place, Emmanuel Macron staged an official reception for the 150 members of the Citizens Convention for the Climate (Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat ) to announce officially how he intended to act upon their multiple proposals for a greener France,  a France that would bring official policy more into line with the overarching objective of the 2015 Paris agreement on climate change to keep the global temperature rise to less than 2°C by the end of the century.

 

The CCC is a serious initiative. The idea behind it was to involve 150 randomly chosen citizens of metropolitan and overseas France over 18 months in an exercise to define detailed environmentally favourable proposals in all aspects of everyday life, from transport to eating, from housing to farming. The citizens were assisted by experts in all these areas and were supported by civil servants and legal experts whose job it was to translate their proposals into draft legislation, ranging from amendments to the Constitution to regulations on food labelling. The proposals, in many areas already in the form of possible legal texts, are impressive in their range and detail. The whole report runs to 460 pages.

 

The question arises though as to how useful all this really is. Are the French really so far behind in their attitudes and behaviour on environmental issues that a citizens’ convention, with its overtones of the pre-revolutionary “Cahier des Doléances” is necessary as a guide along the virtuous path of environmental action? On the substance the answer is surely no. On the form of the initiative however, the answers are many and varied and all of them are political.

 

Over the 40 odd years I have been living in France, there has definitely been a slow but clearly perceptible move to greater environmental awareness in general, as the reality of climate change, both in the form of small changes in everyday surroundings but also extreme weather events in France and the rest of the world, have increasingly impinged on the national consciousness. At the lowest level, recycling of materials like glass, cardboard and plastic has become more or less a national reflex. In our building of 77 apartments, in a leafy western suburb of Paris, recycling bins and bottle banks have been in place for the past 15 or 20 years and most people, even among the reputedly undisciplined French, use them properly. More recently, at the instigation of one or two residents, a composting initiative has been launched. The local authority’s compost expert told us that this was the 400^th such initiative for which he is responsible as he set up three large and sturdy crates in the grounds of our building, that about 15 families now regularly use to dispose of their vegetable peelings and the like. The residents’ association is about to request the extension of the building’s power network to accommodate charging points for electric cars and it can only be a matter of time before the first electrically powered car appears in the car park. More and more neighbours cycle to work (and can now be financially rewarded by their employers for doing so). A cycle repairer working from a well-equipped van now has a regular spot at the local covered market on Friday mornings. Locally produced fruit and vegetables can now be ordered from local organic farms and delivered to a pick-up point in town. In rural areas, street markets have always been a permanent feature of small towns and villages, but more and more city dwellers now prefer to queue up to buy local produce at markets or order it online than take a caddy round a crowded supermarket on a Saturday afternoon. In our holiday village in Southern Brittany, the local fisherman and the local market gardener attract far longer and more patient queues than any other traders on market days. The French being the French of course, the taste and texture of fresh, locally grown produce play a role but the idea that local producers of “organic” food “should be supported” can often be overhead in conversations. 

 

In all these respects therefore, many of the CCC’s proposals are certainly not revolutionary and seem only to underscore and promote underlying trends in society that have been apparent for some time and to which the recent episode of Covid induced confinement and related restrictions have lent new relevance.

 

What is new however is the way all this has come to be reflected in local and national politics. Emmanuel Macron must have realised how lucky he was to be able to make political capital from the labours of the citizens’ convention just one day after the election of a number of green mayors to towns and cities all over France in the delayed second round of municipal elections on June 28^th. Notably, and somewhat unexpectedly, in large cities like Lyon, Bordeaux, Strasbourg, Tours and Besançon. Indeed, it is the first time that, to the surprise of many observers, a green party, EELV (Europe Ecologie les Verts) in an electoral alliance with other left-wing parties, has managed to win power in this number of major cities. Six years ago, only Grenoble, among France’s larger cities, elected a green mayor and many considered his chances of re-election as thin. Similarly in Paris. Anyone who knows the city well cannot fail to have noticed the increasing restrictions on cars in the city centre since the socialist Anne Hidalgo, with the support of the EELV and the communists, was elected mayor six years ago. Despite highly vocal protests by all those affected, like taxi drivers and motorists driving into Paris to work every day, she was re-elected for a second six-year term, after promising even more radical restrictions on cars as well as more green areas and cycling paths. Her task was probably made easier by an exceptionally low turnout, a divided and ineffective opposition but also perhaps by the realisation, during lockdown, by those who actually live in the city, as opposed to those who only work there, that a Paris with fewer cars, noise and pollution is a far more pleasant place to live. In the same vein, the new mayor of Bordeaux, Pierre Hurmic, when asked whether he would soon be outlawing diesel-engined cars from the city centre, answered without hesitation that in his view a city centre was no place for cars at all. Exhibiting his newly discovered green credentials, the re-elected mayor of our Paris suburban town has very recently reserved half of the main road in and out of town for cyclists.

 

The big question now therefore is whether this support for green causes can gain enough political traction for a green candidate to have a serious chance of beating Emmanuel Macron at the presidential election in 2022. Barring major upsets, this seems unlikely. But there are also regional elections in the Spring of next year. They will be a third test in as many years of support for the greens and, in case of further electoral gains, another step towards national power. Before then however, the greens have three crucial issues to solve. The first is leadership. For the moment there are at least three potential standard bearers, Yannick Jadot, who was elected to the European Parliament at the head of a number of EELV MEPS last year, the current mayor of Grenoble, Eric Piolle, and even the socialist mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, who, some think, could weld the disparate bits of the green movement together into a broader alliance. But that would certainly require some solid welding as, and this is the second issue, the movement has distinguished itself in the past more by its divisions than its ability to form alliances and build a broad-based left-wing political platform that the rump of the socialist party has singularly failed to achieve since the ignominious end of the Hollande presidency.

 

The third issue for the greens and their potential allies is the environmental credibility - or lack of it - of Emmanuel Macron and his government. Macron has always sought to present himself as a President fully mindful of environmental issues. Using the considerable powers of his position, he persuaded a popular environmental figure, Nicolas Hulot, to become his first Minister for the Environment, or “ecological transition” as it is boldly named, only to see him resign 15 months later after denouncing the power of “lobbies”. He then appointed another green politician, François de Rugy, but he was forced to resign soon afterwards over an expenses scandal in his previous position as Speaker of the National Assembly.  Now that he has a new Prime Minister and a new government, Macron has appointed another former green activist, Barbara Pompili to the post. In addition, he is making as much as he can, as we have seen above, from the outcome of the citizens’ convention.

 

What is already clear though, reading through the convention’s report, is that anything very radical that could have emerged seems to have been quietly smothered along the way. No radical moves like an immediate blanket ban on dangerous pesticides for example, as the new Minister for the Environment, outspoken as she is reputed to be, has been forced to concede. Nothing more than vague aspirations for "better agro-ecological practices” and certainly nothing very tangible about issues like intensive dairy production or intensive pig rearing that has been responsible for releasing tons of animal excrement into rivers and watercourses for years, that eventually cause a proliferation of toxic seaweed on Brittany’s coastline. No big shake up either of the eternally underperforming and loss-making SNCF freight operation, riddled with restrictive practices and frequent strikes, that has shifted so many goods onto the roads over the years, in lorries that criss-cross France’s motorways and that could easily bring the country to a standstill, as they have done before, if the industry felt under threat.  In other words, this is not the time, less than two years before the election of 2022, to upset big farmers, or the rail unions, or road haulage companies.  And Macron will of course be keenly aware that whenever anything radical has been attempted in the recent past, like special tolls for lorries under President Hollande or environmentally driven fuel taxes for all in 2018, the “bonnet rouges” and “gilets jaunes” movements were the result!

 

Everything seems therefore to point to a continuation of the incremental and relatively uncontroversial path of environmental improvements, until such time as it becomes politically easier or more urgent to be more radical. Whether that will be enough to avert the environmental disaster that some experts say is just around the corner is another matter altogether. One thing the “gilets jaunes” protests have made painfully clear however is that when faced with the choice between “the end of the month and the end of the world”, as the saying goes, most people, for the time being at least, will choose the end of the month. In this respect, the ultimate outcome - and surely the ultimate aim - of the middle-of-the-road approach of the citizens’ convention is to give a higher profile to the environmental credentials of Macron and his government. We shall have to wait until the presidential campaign gets going in earnest in early 2022 to see if a majority of French voters are convinced.

Wishful thinking !

President Macron’s address to the nation last Sunday evening was, as usual, long on rhetoric and short on detail. Apart from the announcements of further steps to relax the lockdown and order most children back to school on June 22nd, there were few clues about the future direction of economic policy and above all, what, if anything, will be done about the huge accumulation of debt over the past three months of the crisis. The only clear promise was that there would no increase in taxes; the French would simply have to “produce more and work more”. 

The economy minister, Bruno le Maire, was on the radio on Monday morning to fill in a little detail: what the President meant by the French working more, he explained, was that more of them should be in work, meaning, presumably, that efforts would continue to reduce unemployment, but not that each worker, heaven forbid,  might have to work longer hours or take shorter holidays. The overall effect of “more work” would be to increase economic growth and that this alone would gradually reduce the debt. Without being quite as severe as Alex Massie, a British journalist who wrote in “The Spectator” the other day about a UK cabinet minister, that “the spectacle of intelligent people deliberately peddling nonsense is often aggravating but it’s rarely as enraging as it is now” , there are several reasons to believe that such talk is no more than wishful thinking and that, what is more, most people in France and, more importantly, in its government, don’t take it very seriously.

The first is the past record of France’s economic growth and unemployment. Over the past 20 years, basically since the introduction of the Euro, France’s GDP growth has rarely exceeded 2% a year. After 2009, when it fell by 2.9%, it has exceeded 2% only twice and has generally bumped along at about 1% a year. As for unemployment, it has remained stubbornly high, at around 10% over the same period and only started falling consistently but slowly, to 8.5%, in 2019. While there is likely to be a spurt of catch-up growth after the Covid induced downturn, there is little reason to expect growth rates to double and unemployment to halve in the next few years. Even less likely considering the amount of new debt that will have to be paid off. And yet those are the kinds of trends that would be necessary to create real wealth and pay off debt. State intervention in the economy will not make things any easier. Renault, for instance, of which the state holds 15%, has just been granted a state guaranteed loan of €5 billion, but on conditions that it does not close down too many factories in France and lay off too many French workers. Peugeot, also part owned by the state, was intending to bring to France a few thousand workers from Poland to help it cope with post Covid demand. In the face of objections from government and the unions, it has had to scale back the numbers. Nobody will be surprised at the continuation of the age-old French tradition of government meddling in industry, either openly or simply by a nod and a wink to business leaders. Indeed, there are undoubtedly justifiable reasons for it, but it is hardly compatible with the robust rates of growth that would be required to put France’s public finances back on an even keel.

The second is the size of France’s debt and the extent of its social safety net. In his address, President Macron said that the state has “mobilised” €500 billion to deal with the Covid crisis, demonstrating, he went on, “the strength of our state and our social model”. The figure is eye-watering and it covers a multitude of different policies. Some of it is in the form of state guaranteed loans to companies and industries. Many of the underlying loans will be repaid one day and the guarantees will not be needed. Some of it will be invested in research and development, where the hope is that the eventual return will be higher than the cost of capital. In addition, some of the extra debt is held, and will continue to be held, on the balance sheet of the ECB. As long as it stays there, it will not need to be repaid, and because of low interest rates and the payment of dividends to the state from the central bank, will cost nothing. The ECB has undertaken to keep that debt on its balance sheet until the end of 2022, but is likely to be prevailed upon to extend that term. This nevertheless leaves a sizeable chunk of debt that has financed, and continues to finance, current spending and that will have to be paid off: the huge bill for Covid related health spending; the deficit of the unemployment fund and furlough payments, twice as generous as corresponding payments in Germany according to an expert on the evening news a few days ago; the continuing deficit of the still unreformed pension system. And even if taxes are not raised, they will surely not be lowered and will remain among the highest of the OECD countries. An instructive case in point is the sinking fund for social security debt, the CADES (Caisse d’Amortissement de la Dette Sociale) a kind of bad bank for social debt that was set up in 1996, siphons off about €16 billion of tax revenue annually and was supposed to have paid off its €45 billion of outstanding debt by 2009. Now holding debt of €260 billion, due to be paid off by 2033, it is to be saddled with an extra €136 billion, according to newspaper reports (notably in “Le Canard Enchainé” of June 10^th), only some of which is Covid related. The tax that funds the repayment of this debt, the CRDS (Contribution pour le Remboursement de la Dette Sociale) is the kind of tax of which finance ministers dream, with its huge base and very low rate. It will now go on until at least 2036, continuing to deduct seemingly imperceptible amounts from monthly pay slips and annual income tax statements, but never making the headlines on prime-time news or appearing on placards in street demonstrations.  In addition to all this existing debt, the health minister has just announced that a fifth branch of welfare spending, on top of health, family allowances, pensions and work-related accidents, will be created to fund social care for the elderly and dependent. Again, a perfectly respectable and even admirable move given the increasing number of dependent elderly people and perfectly in line with French people’s expectations of their generous welfare system, but likely to cost, according to some estimates, upwards of €30 billion a year for many years to come. Presidents Sarkozy and Hollande both considered introducing this big dose of additional social spending during their terms but decided not to go ahead when they found out how much it would cost. The current government has simply announced this new policy but said nothing, as yet, about how it will be financed. But, we are assured, no new taxes will be introduced and existing taxes will not rise.  It will all be financed by economic growth.

A further reason, and more insidious consequence of Covid related spending and the resulting debt, is that it makes it that much harder for public opinion to believe that money cannot be found for anything.  Boris Johnson was wont to say, before the Covid crisis struck, that there is no such thing as a “magic money tree”. And yet Macron’s headline figure of €500 billion will make it look to everyone as if he has conjured up a huge and bountiful one within just three months! The effect this will have on the presentation and negotiation of future policies is as yet untested but could be profound. Why quibble, negotiators of pay increases for health and other front-line workers might argue, about a pay rise of a mere €200 - €300 a month when the state can find €500 billion within a few weeks? Why reduce unemployment benefits or curtail furlough payments when the extra cost is just a few million a year? Even with the highly controversial pension reform, which may be back on the agenda before the end of the year, it was estimated by the most militant union leaders that the existing system needed only €8 billion a year to balance the books. Is this not chickenfeed compared to €500 billion? 

Once again, and probably more urgently than ever, the sustainability of France’s generous welfare system is on the line. Nobody really knows what overall impact this vast run-up in debt will have in the longer term and in the absence of meaningful reform. The ECB will eventually hit the limits of expanding its balance sheet and when it does, long term interest rates will rise. Some economists believe that the headlong money creation of the last three months can lead only to monetary inflation or to the formation of bubbles in real estate or financial assets or both. When these bubbles eventually and inevitably burst, the impact can be cataclysmic, as we witnessed at the bursting of the “tech bubble” in 2000 or the “subprime” crisis of 2008. However, it seems fairly safe to assume that when these things actually happen, Emmanuel Macron will have long since left the Elysée Palace, even if he is elected for a second term, and today’s crop of militant union leaders will have been replaced by perhaps even more militant ones. By that time, my four grandchildren, all of them currently under twelve, will be at university or in further training and looking for their first job.

So, what else is new? Or as the French might put it, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”.

Entrenched inequality

The protests and demonstrations all over the world after the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis have exposed a festering little hypocrisy in French society. An unauthorised demonstration in front of the main court building in Paris last week, called only on Facebook, attracted, to general surprise, an estimated twenty thousand people at a time when large demonstrations were still banned because of the risk of spreading the coronavirus.  The immediate reason for the protest was the death in police custody four years ago of a young black man called Adama Traoré, the cause of which has never been unequivocally established and which members of his family and community attribute to unwarranted police violence during his arrest. The shocking death on video of George Floyd under the knee of a white police officer has triggered a fresh call for “Justice for Adama” that the demonstrators feel has never been done.

Racism targeting black and brown people in France is as prevalent as it is in many other countries.  What is different in France however is the way it is treated by the state.  A time-honoured tradition, originating in the revolutionary era of the late 18th century, holds that the population of France is not made up of different “communities”, but only of “citizens” with equal rights in a “one and indivisible republic”. A lofty ideal indeed, but one that has been badly battered by subsequent developments in society, particularly since the start of large-scale immigration in the middle of the 20th century.

The problem starts with names and expressions. Whereas in the UK for instance, one hears constant references to BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) communities, in France there is no such designation. Sociologists and statisticians are not allowed to gather any specific information about such “communities” as officially they don’t exist. The furthest the Prime Minister, Edouard Philippe, was willing to go in a nicely phrased soundbite the other day was to refer to “a part” of French society that felt that “the republic was not doing enough to protect its children”. Present Macron followed up a day or two later referring to racism in general as “a betrayal of republican universalism”. It follows, understandably therefore, that the term Afro-Américain used widely by French journalists to designate George Floyd is rejected by many. “Why Afro-American?” commented one newspaper reader recently. “Would one call someone from Martinique an Afro-French person?”. The guardians of correct French in the newspaper “Le Monde” have made their views clear in their blog: the term Afro-Américian, they write, is discriminatory in itself. George Floyd was, and should be referred to simply as “un Américain”.

Admirable, one might think, in theory, but in practice a definite problem.

While its known for instance that a higher proportion of people have died from Covid-19 in the northern suburbs of Paris than practically anywhere else in France, this knowledge remains purely anecdotal as no statistics are, nor can be, compiled, about different death rates in different communities and neighbourhoods. The northern Paris suburbs are known to house, in huge and unattractive housing estates, large numbers of people who are described in the media as “people of immigrant origin”. They tend to be poor, often have large families and small apartments, and are more likely to be either unemployed or employed in unskilled jobs as casual and sometimes unregistered labour.  In terms of security and policing, these areas, euphemistically referred to as “difficult neighbourhoods”, are known to harbour thriving hubs of drug trafficking and other underground activities.  Anyone wishing to find out more need go no further than the novels of Olivier Norek, a former police officer turned author and script-writer (Code 93 or Territoires) or films like Les Misérables, by Ladjy Ly, brought up in one of the neighbourhoods he depicts in his film. Its title is deliberately lifted from Victor Hugo’s eponymous 19^th century novel and last year, it won the jury’s special prize at the Cannes Film Festival before being in contention for the best foreign movie at the Oscars.  Another landmark film, “La Haine” by Matthieu Kassovitz is now 25 years old.

Nobody in France, least of all in government, can therefore deny that there is a problem and that it has been around for many years.  The police, who are supposed to maintain “republican order” in these “difficult neighbourhoods” know full well who and what they are up against but have not always displayed sound judgement and great skill in doing their job, to say the least. For their part, youths from black and North African communities constantly complain of being subject to police harassment and sometimes violence. Cases like that of Adama Traoré or that, over ten years ago of two black teenagers who took refuge and were electrocuted in an electricity sub-station after being chased by police, regularly hit the headlines and trigger violent demonstrations. And although there are clearly racist tendencies in the police, as the discovery of a closed group of police officers on Facebook, riddled with racist comments, demonstrates, these exist in all parts of society and police representatives are quick to point out that they are often unfairly singled out for criticism in doing their job.

Despite special efforts to promote children of immigrant origin (anonymous CVs for job seekers, special scholarships at universities and “grandes écoles”etc.) which in any other country would be called positive discrimination, one can’t help feeling that national unity might be better served by officially admitting that specific communities are victims of specific discrimination and trying to get to grips with the detail and extent of the phenomenon. The recent demonstrations, sparked by the killing of George Floyd and calling for a reopening of the case of Adama Traoré, show that anger and indignation in these communities run high. Many other demonstrations have taken place since, all over France, in which the demonstrators are largely black, and posters inscribed with “Black Lives Matter” and “No Justice, No Peace” are prominent. The public debate was given a further twist yesterday when the government spokeswoman, Sibeth Ndiaye, black and of Senegalese origin, spoke in favour of breaking a taboo and compiling “ethnic statistics” only to be roundly contradicted by President Macron a few hours later, who said that only specific anti-discrimination measure can be envisaged.

Republican values on citizens and equality strike a chord in the French national psyche and for many French people are one of the big and positive differences between France and countries like the UK and, above all, the US. But France’s numerous and able statisticians would surely be quick to remind politicians that they can’t properly manage what they can’t properly measure.

Back to square one ?

In her excellent book on Emmanuel Macron and the background to his rise to the presidency of France in 2017, (Revolution Française – Emmanuel Macron and the quest to reinvent a nation – Bloomsbury, 2018) Sophie Pedder, the Paris bureau chief of “The Economist” quotes part of an interview that Macron gave just a few months after becoming President: “I’m not made to lead in calm weather,” he said “my predecessor was, but I’m made for storms”. Indeed, there have been many testimonies to his poise and self-control, in Pedder’s book and other accounts since. At the height of the gilets jaunes protests in November 2018 for instance, when violent demonstrators seemed determined to march on the Elysée Palace, Macron was reported in the following week’s “Canard Enchaîné” as being expressionless and unmoved (“de marbre”) in the face of what his security staff considered an imminent threat. He didn’t budge.

As Macron now faces the second, almost perfect, storm of his presidency, he will need all the poise and self-control he can muster in deciding what to do next.

The effect of a storm is to throw a ship off course. In this case, the ship of state. How far off course depends on one’s view of where Macron has been taking France since he became President in May 2017. Contrary to what his political opponents and many in the media seem to think, his overall strategy has not been to open up France to the forces of “ultraliberal” capitalism, favouring the rich to the detriment of the less well off, but to make all French people a little less reliant on the state and its comforting but also stifling embrace, and a little more reliant on their own efforts. State intervention in the economy and the cast iron social safety net that the French enjoy at the price of high taxes and high public debt has been shifted only slightly. Or, more precisely, had been shifted only slightly before the epidemic of Covid-19 hit the country.

Running through most of France’s policy shifts since 2017, including those that have not yet been finalised, it is indeed this “liberal-light” theme of more self-reliance that seems common to all of them. The initial labour market reforms, making it less complicated and, above all, less costly to hire and fire workers had started to make a dent in some of the highest unemployment figures in the OECD. The subsequent education and training reforms, putting the choice of training schemes in the hands of employees themselves and taking it away from social partners, is credited with a big increase in apprenticeships and other training courses. The reform of the generous unemployment benefits scheme would have been a lasting incentive for the unemployed to seek retraining and find a job more quickly. But as this reform had not actually come into force by the time the Covid-19 crisis struck, it is now in limbo, some of its provisions have been put on hold and are likely to be reversed. And then of course there was the major reform of pensions, designed to adapt the pension system to a modern, post-industrial economy and also to reduce pressure on the public purse, but which had generated only controversy and confusion before the crisis. It is now on hold too and, according to some sources, more than likely to be abandoned altogether.

As he leaves his Prime Minister to oversee the precise measure to relax the lockdown from May 11th onwards, the number of employees furloughed under a state sponsored scheme settles at around 10 million, the country’s public debt to GDP ratio creeps onwards and upwards, as the state “invests in debt”, as Gérald Darmanin, the budget minister put it quaintly in a TV interview the other day, and as the latest unemployment figures soar and can only get worse, the question is whether Macron can, or indeed intends to, revert to the same course he had been charting previously, at a time when the natural reflex of most people, and not only in France, is to turn to the state for help and protection. Indeed, the man himself, in his nationwide address on April 13th, seemed unsure of his future course of action, concluding with the words, “we must all reinvent ourselves, starting with me” (“nous devons tous nous réinventer, et moi d’abord”). What that enigmatic phrase will ultimately mean remains to be seen.

For the time being at least, the French government has little choice but to continue to cope as best it can with the impact of the coronavirus and its economic fallout. Luckily, its extra borrowing is still at negative interest rates, a relatively comfortable situation which indicates that lenders have not yet lost trust in the French state’s capacity to repay its debts. But the prospect of higher interest rates is never far away. An unguarded comment by the new President of the European Central Bank was enough to push up interest rates on long-term Italian debt and the recent judgement by the German Constitutional Court has not made life any easier for the ECB to buy as much sovereign debt as it judges necessary to maintain a credible stance as lender of last resort. All this is a far cry from the situation that Macron would undoubtedly have preferred, to reduce deficits and outstanding debt and thus elicit a more favourable response from neighbours like Germany and the Netherlands to the request to loosen their own purse strings in favour of greater European solidarity.

In a recent article in “Le Monde”, Cédric Pietralunga, a journalist, writing about Macron's possible post-lockdown strategy, quotes him as saying, “of course we must protect, but protection doesn’t mean anesthetising people, as if there were nothing else to be done.” (“on doit assumer de protéger mais ce n’est pas protéger pour anesthésier, pour dire qu’il n’y a plus rien à faire”). He goes on to write that, “wanting the French to be more self-reliant is nothing new for Emmanuel Macron” (“cette envie de voir les français se prendre en main n’est pas nouvelle chez Emmanuel Macron”) referring back to his first New Year’s address to the nation in which he paraphrased JFK’s famous call, “ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country”. The government spokeswoman, Sibeth Ndiaye, is quoted in the same article as saying, “the basic message is that the state alone cannot find the solution to relaxing lockdown…it’s only if everyone feels that they have their own contribution to make that we shall be able to come through this.” (“le message au fond est de dire que l’Etat seul ne peut résoudre le déconfinement … c’est parce que chacun se sentira dépositaire d’une part de la solution qu’on pourra surmonter.”). What is missing in such messages, as well as journalists’ comments on them, is the link between more or less self-reliance and the sustainability of France’s social model. The more people rely on the state, the more taxes and debt are bound to rise, a message that the French don’t really want to hear, certainly not in the present circumstances, and that very few politicians, including Macron, have yet dared to spell out in so many words.

However he decides to “reinvent himself”, Macron too, for the time being at least, has little choice but to batten down the hatches and limit the storm damage, while trying to persuade other ships of state to come to the rescue. A tactical change of course is undoubtedly essential before the overall strategy can move on again. This tactical change will last until the storm has blown over, probably by the time of the presidential election campaign in just two years’ time. Only then will we have a clearer idea of whether the French are likely to give Emmanuel Macron a second chance to continue, in Pedder’s words, “his quest to reinvent a nation”.

Life behind the lines

France is at war according to President Macron in his televised address the other day – at war against an invisible and elusive enemy (un ennemi invisible et insaissisable). The view from the front line is brought to us every evening on the 8 o'clock news, with scenes (often the same from one evening to the next) from hospitals and care homes, helicopters, aircraft and specially adapted high-speed trains, all taking critically ill patients from hospitals that are full to others, all over France, that are not, but also to neighbouring German and Swiss hospitals, interspersed with gut-wrenching interviews with admirable and overworked medical and nursing staff.

Life behind the lines is a lot less dramatic, even if we are constantly reminded that we are all doing our bit for the war effort by staying at home. On the first morning of lockdown, I dutifully filled in my attestation de déplacement dérogatoire, wondering what we would call this marvel of French administrative prose in English. One British journalist writing about events in France referred to it, rather pompously, as “an exeat” – somehow, I can’t imagine a policeman asking me for my “exeat”! But then no UK government would dream of imposing such a constraint in the first place. An English friend wrote that she wasn’t happy about being told what to do and what not to do; I answered that the French weren’t either, but that they are more used to it – and more used to finding ways around it.. That being said, it’s now almost three weeks since the lockdown was imposed, and I have seen neither hide nor hair of a policeman, let alone been challenged to produce my document. Keen to make well-publicised examples of motorists fleeing down the motorway to their second homes, they obviously don’t bother to venture into the smallish town centre, and certainly not the side streets, of a quiet residential suburb.

And quiet the streets are. Eerily quiet. No sound of cars driving to work in the rush hour, just the sound of birdsong early in the morning. I even heard a seagull yesterday, obviously not taking confinement very seriously.  The hoardings for the first round of municipal elections on March 15^th, that now seems months ago, have not been removed.  Work has stopped on most building sites, including that of a major rebuild of the local technical college, but not, curiously, on complex and heavy lifting engineering work to repair an embankment that subsided onto our local railway line at the beginning of February. A dozen workers toil six days a week, with helmets and heavy-duty gloves, but without facemasks, and hope to have finished by the time we are deconfined. The only other sounds that float up to our open fourth floor windows are kids tearing round the garden of our building on their bikes and a lone teenager bouncing a basketball before practising his throws. In the road outside, a father sets up makeshift goalposts every afternoon, quickly removed if a car comes by, to play football with his four children.

The French are reputed to be an unruly lot but everybody I have come across on my daily walks to the shops or around the neighbourhood observes strict social distancing, crossing the road if they see someone coming towards them and waiting quietly outside shops behind the floor tape markings, one meter apart. Yesterday, I met a neighbour walking towards me on the same side of the road. As he normally cycles to work and takes long cycle rides at the weekend, I asked him, from a safe distance, why he hadn’t taken his bike out, realising as I said it that nobody is supposed to stray further than 1 kilometer from home.  To my surprise, he answered “No, I wouldn’t do anything like that” (Non, je ne m’autoriserais pas cet écart). Would the French be as civic spirited if there weren’t the threat of a fine? Some certainly wouldn’t, but my feeling is that the vast majority would, a situation not very different from that of most other countries faced with this nasty epidemic.

Municipal parks and woodlands being closed, the only places where you are likely to meet more than one person at a time are the shops. As our fresh food market was closed down just after the start of lockdown, I have fallen back, like many others, on the local convenience store which is just a ten minute walk away, as well as the local bakery; deprived of freedom to roam is one thing, doing without a crispy baguette is quite another! After the initial panic buying, mainly of foods like pasta and flour rather than toilet rolls (the French have their priorities right!) the shops are now more or less back to normal. As each palleted delivery arrives, every single employee I have ever seen at the shop descends on the aisles, unpacking, stacking the shelves and piling up flattened boxes. French labour laws are reputed to be notoriously inflexible but this shop, like many others, seems to have worked effectively around their constraints.

Lockdown started on March 17^th and has now been extended in two stages beyond April 15th. President Macron will be on nationwide TV on Monday evening to tell us what’s next. Judging by the Chinese experience, we could be in for another month, maybe more. With or without compulsory facemasks, still in short supply and reserved for health care workers only?  With a massive campaign of blood testing that our German neighbours seem to be able to organise with consummate efficiency, or without? With a “Stop Covid” mobile phone app. designed to trace our movements, that has sparked the predictable debate about civil liberties and the protection of privacy? As if the very fact of confinement were not in itself a massive restriction of personal freedom. We shall undoubtedly find out more on Monday, but these are all areas where the French government, like many others, has clearly been caught napping. A week ago, I made myself a makeshift facemask using a piece of cloth and two elastic bands, on the basis of a YouTube demonstration by the US surgeon general. A daughter-in-law has gone one better and put her sewing machine to work for the whole family; two very professional looking facemasks turned up in the post on Friday morning. Like most people, I’m not sure now useful if it is as a protection from the virus, but it is psychologically comforting when you are in a confined space like a shop or a pharmacy. As for blood testing, imagining myself an asymptomatic carrier, I asked a nurse who came to the house yesterday when she thought the local testing laboratory would be able to run blood tests on request to find out who has developed antibodies and who hasn’t. She looked blank before answering that it would take at least another two weeks. That takes us to the end of April. Kids are supposed to go back to school on May 4^th, but that seems more and more unlikely.

We shall no doubt find out more on Monday evening.

Whatever it takes !

The former President of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, will go down in history for three words that he uttered at the height of the Euro crisis in 2012. His famous sentence “The ECB is prepared to do whatever it takes to preserve the Euro” pronounced on July 26, 2012, is widely credited with having saved the Euro from imminent collapse. For his nationwide TV address on the coronavirus crisis last Thursday evening, President Emmanuel Macron found an excellent French equivalent. The French government would take every necessary measure to protect the population and the economy, “quoi qu’il en coûte”, he declared.

It is of course an enduring feature of French history that in times of crisis, when the people are not rising up to try and overthrow their government, they expect it to take the lead in organising and financing whatever measures appear necessary for the common good. During his short presidential term, that has not yet run three years, Emmanuel Macron has already experienced both types of crisis – the “gilets jaunes" movement with its attendant insurrectional violence in late 2018 and early 2019 and today, the coronavirus crises. In his nationwide address on Thursday evening, he did not disappoint, stating no less than three times that the state would do its duty “quoi qu’il en coûte”. His stated reliance on expert medical opinion, an implied sideswipe at conspiracy theories flourishing on social media, also sounded convincing, at a time when, as “The Spectator” put it the other day, “a social media lie often has greater power than the considered opinion of an expert”. I found myself thinking that for someone who had had so little political experience before being elected President, he has come a long way since May 2017. Can anyone seriously imagine the self-styled leader of the opposition and candidate against Macron for the presidency in 2017, Marine Le Pen, delivering such an address?

The “whatever it takes” will nevertheless have a high cost. Bruno Le Maire, the finance minister, spelt out the next day that “several dozen billion Euros”, would be needed to fully compensate businesses obliged to put their employees on short time work, pay out loss of earnings to employees and the self-employed, postpone tax and social security levies etc. etc.  And that was before Saturday’s announcement by the Prime Minister that cafés, restaurants and other non-essential services would be closed down for an indefinite period. The commitment is clearly open-ended as nobody knows at this stage for how long such measures will be necessary. And the fiscal impact will be substantial, meaning that, “the 3% deficit target demanded by Brussels will not be met this year”, as a radio journalist unhelpfully and inaccurately noted. Of course it won’t, but then it hasn’t been for most of the past 40 years. 

Taking a big step back from the fast-moving situation of the coronavirus epidemic, not only in France but throughout Europe, it is sad but true that so many countries have made no serious attempt during the boom years to tackle the underlying reasons for the expansion of public spending and implement the kind of structural reforms that the OECD for example has been urging for years, rather than take the easy way out by starving essential public services of cash that only the state can provide. Had they done so, they would be better placed to face a situation like that of today, in which public spending is both essential and inevitable. Taking just three examples from around Europe, Italy’s public health system has been struggling for years to cope with the austerity that has been imposed on it, UK governments of the past ten years have systematically made cuts to the National Health Service, France’s public hospitals have long been protesting about dwindling investment and staffing levels. Most commentators in France seem to agree that for all his reforming zeal, Emmanuel Macron has done little to curb the seemingly inexorable upward movement in overall public spending, let alone start to reduce it.  To do so, he would need, as many have advised, to initiate a radical reform of the tentacular civil service in order to dramatically increase its overall productivity, oblige the state to relinquish areas of the economy in which the private sector would be better equipped to impose the necessary financial and management disciplines and prepare the national budget for precisely the kind of crisis that France is facing today. None of this of course can be done overnight, and the next major national elections are looming in just over two years’ time. Pension reform, in which many have placed their hopes of stopping a permanent drain on the public purse, has been contested every step of the way and has not yet cleared all of its legislative hurdles. Even if it eventually does, it will not produce tangible results for many years. But in the very real here and now, Emmanuel Macron is facing his second major fiscal splurge in as many years.  

A tale of two companies

February and March are the months in which companies all over the world release their financial results for the previous year. France is no exception and the results season in Paris is now in full swing. Two companies particularly are in the public eye at this time: Aéroports de Paris (ADP) and La Francaise des Jeux (FDJ). Their respective destinies are an interesting illustration of French peoples’ contradictory attitudes to companies in general, their role in wealth creation and the role of the state as a shareholder, attitudes which are also reflected in the ongoing national debate about pension reform. 

ADP is the operator of the very lucrative Paris airports of Roissy, Orly and Le Bourget. The French state has a controlling stake in the company but privatised it partially in 2006, during the presidency of Jacques Chirac, keeping just over 50%. Anyone who bought shares at the IPO and has kept them ever since would have seen them increase in value by well over 200%, not counting a regular and comfortable yearly dividend. The current government’s intention to sell its controlling stake to investors has generated a wave of intense and vocal hostility in some sectors of public opinion, to the extent that the whole operation is at best delayed and at worst in doubt.

FDJ is the operator of the very lucrative French national lottery. It was wholly owned by the French state until last November when 80% was sold, effectively privatising the company. The operation was oversubscribed to the extent that orders from small investors were served in totality and larger orders were reduced. The introductory share price was at the top end of the expected range, rose by about 15% after the IPO and stayed there. The announcement of the company’s results for 2019 have boosted it by a further 15%. The government has congratulated itself on a resounding success.

It is difficult to fathom why the prospect of one privatisation has attracted so much popular hostility while another actual privatisation has been such a popular success. Both companies share similar characteristics. Both can be described as “safe”, in the sense that they can both continue to do well in an economic downturn. Both are de facto monopolies, both are well managed by teams of former top civil servants with close links to government, the core activities of both will continue to be subject to some degree of government regulation, both will serve regular dividends. Neither can be moved offshore.

An expression often used by opponents of the privatisation of ADP is that the state is selling its “crown jewels”, an expression that could equally well apply to FDJ. The state wants to privatise ADP “just because it needs the money” is another, often heard, criticism, as if this were a heinous crime on the part of a state whose public debt to GDP ratio is now over 100%. The same point could be made about FDJ but never is.

The real sore point among opponents of the privatisation of ADP appears to be the mooted suitor for the government’s controlling stake, the construction company, VINCI, that took an 8% stake in ADP in 2006 and has made no bones of its ambition to take it over when it is fully privatised. VINCI’s original sin, in the eyes of these opponents, is that it became the concession holder of a large network of French motorways when the state sold them at about the same time as it partially privatised ADP. Since then, the motorways and the company that runs them have been the subject of endless controversy: the tolls are “too high” and have “increased more than inflation” and “motorists are being wildly overcharged”, “the state sold them far too cheaply in the first place”, etc. etc. Few opponents seem prepared to accept the argument, which is hardly ever heard, that large infrastructure projects can either be paid for by the state budget out of general taxation or by their users. In the case of the motorways, there seems to a good economic rationale for the second option as, contrary to public services like the police, the courts, health care, pensions and education that stand to benefit everybody, infrastructure primarily benefits its users, many of whom, it should be noted in passing, are drivers from outside France and not therefore subject to French taxation.  Nobody seems willing to admit either that since purchasing the motorway concessions, VINCI has done an excellent job of managing and maintaining them, that motorists flock to them to speed down South or out West come holiday time, complaining all the way to the toll booths as they go.  Populist politicians, mainly from the hard left, fall over each other to denounce a capitalist conspiracy to cheat the state and gouge motorists.  At the height of the gilets jaunes protests at the end of 2018, toll gates were often delberately opened by protestors and sometimes even destroyed by fire. A number of the perpetrators have recently been convicted of arson and wilful damage by the courts.

Mainly as a result of the gilets jaunes’ demands for a "peoples’ referendum", the French government felt obliged to concede that any issue of “major” public concern could be put to a referendum of this kind if a petition to request it was signed by 10% of the electorate. Opponents from both the left and the right wings of politics were quick to seize this opportunity and launched a petition for a referendum on the privatisation of ADP. They seem very unlikely to gather the 4.7 million signatures necessary by the deadline of March 12th. What the government will do then is uncertain, but it will certainly not take any controversial decision quickly, just a few days before the first round of municipal elections and still embroiled  as it is in trying to get legislation on pension reform through parliament. 

Meanwhile, VINCI has purchased control of London’s second airport, Gatwick, after acquiring a string of Portuguese airports some years ago, positioning itself as a major airport operator worldwide. Like LVMH or Airbus and other successful and world-renowned French firms, it could become another French champion. But strangely, many in France seek to deny it that role. This is all the more puzzling as those who have complained loudly about high taxes, and particularly the gilets jaunes, do not seem to want to realise that the more they ask the state to do, the less likely it is that taxes can be reduced. And the more likely it is that those public goods that so many rely on throughout the country like the police, the courts and other universal public services, will continue to be starved of cash.

Funnily enough, it was France under Napoleon 3^rd in the 1850s that pioneered the concession of public services to the private sector - what would be called “outsourcing” in today’s jargon. Water was the first of them and led to the creation of private companies like Lyonnnaise des Eaux or Compagnie Générale des Eaux, that are still around today, even if in different guises and under different names. Most consumers pay privately owned water utilities for their water supplies without a murmur and many of them are probably unaware that these “public services” are outsourced to the private sector. Telecommunications, after being a state monopoly for many years, is run today by four private sector operators in a competitive market. Now that FDJ has been privatised with a minimum of fuss, the controversy over infrastructure concessions in general and ADP in particular is all the more difficult to understand. To coin a phrase often heard in a country supposedly steeped in Cartesian logic, " c'est pas logique " !