As was always suggested, goods transport after leaving the EU is going to be challenging – leaving without a deal will be disastrous. As Logistics UK shows: Then come the end of the year Channel Tunnel safety rules will be in doubt because the Tories cannot stomach any obligations where the European Court of Justice… Read more
Category:
France
The French are doing it so much better…
My piece yesterday bemoaned the arbitrary end of furlough and the complete lack of any clear-sighted direction for the economy. Indeed I now understand that the government’s ill thought out ‘kickstart’ scheme is in fact available only to those able to offer a minimum of 30 placements. No wonder Tesco is in favour and this… Read more
The French will have to build a wall …
If Brexit in fact is actually happening – and so far it seems it is – then unsurprisingly, its spirit is gradually dying of its own contradictions. Immigration is just one area when taking back control means actually relying on the co-operation of the er, French. True we already rely on French co-operation, but that… Read more
‘What matters’ is that equality works
We are currently told that Black Lives Matter which, like all lives, of course they do. And while we now discover that the American policeman accused of murder had had 17 complaints against him, none of which seemed to have changed anything, and, indeed there are also instances of American policemen killing white arrestees with… Read more
Macron much more impressive than our lot, but
Macron is rather impressive in his interview for the FT here – and certainly way more reflective and intelligent than our own political pigmies. And although he has made mistakes he has endeavoured to protect his people – which is rather more than our own government “we cannot protect every business and every household” (why… Read more
The banking party
In the old joke about hell the French were supposed to be the mechanics and the chefs were British. Times have changed; not only are British chefs rather good but so too are the French much better at the ‘mechanics’ of society. The French government’s emergency, state funded, unemployment pay of 84% of normal wages… Read more
The bureaucratic French
On March 17 Bruno Le Maire, French finance minister (their equivalent of Rishi Sunak) unveiled €8.5 billion state scheme to pay French employees ‘partial’ unemployment benefit so as to avoid redundancies during the Coronavirus crisis. One week on, 730,000 employees are already benefiting from this scheme (cost so far: €2.2 billion). M. Le Maire will… Read more
President for the Rich
There have been many recent reports of the generosity of several of France’s richest families giving to the fund that has been set up to rebuild Notre-Dame. Bernard Arnault of LVMH gave €200m and even put his own creative, architectural teams at the state’s disposal. His son, Antoine, was quoted as saying “As caretakers of… Read more
The carers’ revolt?
David Graeber of the LSE has an interesting article on the yellow vests (they are not vests but waistcoats – itself another misnomer of course – but I suppose as we have bullet proof vests we have to accept vests as a translation of what is jackets in French!) movement in France. I think David… Read more