Why are the British becoming so French?
THE air in the corner of Battersea where I live is suffused with the smell of butter thanks to a new bakery-cum-café. August Bakery produces bread and croissants in such delicious profusion that the place is permanently packed. At weekends (which these days appear to start on Friday), people queue around the block from eight in the morning for their little piece of baked paradise.
Is this one of many signs that Britain is turning into France? The British and French have had a turbulent relationship since at least the Norman Conquest in 1066 (I have on my shelves a fat book entitled A Thousand Years of Annoying the French by Stephen Clarke). Charles de Gaulle vetoed British membership of the then European Economic Community in 1963 and 1967 on the grounds that, as a maritime nation, the British looked to the world rather than to the continent. Many Britons voted for Brexit in 2016 for the same reason. One leading Brexiteer, Peter (now Lord) Lilley, kept a portrait of De Gaulle on his office wall during his various ministerial appointments.
Yet rather than turning toward the world, the British seem to be doing everything in their power to turn into their old rival. England now has 450 wineries producing 3.15 million bottles annually. The sparkling wines are even good. The shelves of supermarkets such as Waitrose and Marks & Spencer testify to how Britons over 40 now prefer wine to beer. Britain can now boast many first-rate restaurants and farmers' markets (though the average British provincial town is still not a patch of its French equivalent). There is even a popular category of pubs — gastro pubs — that specialise in things like duck confit or steak frites rather than fish and chips or shepherd's pie.
The queue outside the August Bakery on a Friday morning is also testimony to Britain's enthusiasm for another aspect of French culture: a work-life balance tilted more toward life. A decade or so ago, the British scoffed at France's taste for taking a month-long vacation in the summer and reading books such as Bonjour Paresse ('Hello Laziness') by Corinne Maier, which describes how she got away with doing nothing at work, and Absolument dé-bor-dée! ('Absolutely Snowed Under'), which describes how French public-sector workers competed to do as little as possible. Now scoffing has turned into imitation. Nine million working-age Britons are 'economically inactive'; 43 per cent of Britons tell pollsters it would be a good thing if less importance was placed on work compared with 40 per cent of French; 93 per cent say that leisure is important to their lives compared with 86 per cent of French.
If popular culture is pushing Britain in a French direction, Prime Minister Keir Starmer's Labour government is also pushing it. Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, is masterminding a Labour Employment Rights Bill that aims to reinforce employment rights, entrench statutory sick pay and family leave and outlaw zero-hour contracts; it will, in other words, make the British labour market as rigid as the French. Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, is in the process of creating a national energy champion, Great British Energy, which is intended to boost the production of clean energy.
The British political system is well advanced in its transition from a parliamentary system into a French-style presidential system. Successive British prime ministers have gathered more and more power into their own hands. The British Foreign Office is now all but irrelevant from a strategic point of view, as the big decisions are taken in Downing Street.
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The electorate is also fracturing along French lines. France has seen the two main postwar parties, the conservatives and the socialists, first lose their monopoly of power and then enter sharp decline. For the first time since the Second World War, it's possible to imagine this happening in Britain, particularly to the Tories. France has also seen a radical right party, previously called the National Front and now the National Rally, move from the periphery to the centre of politics, with the largest number of opposition delegates in the French parliament and deep roots in provincial France. Nigel Farage's Reform Party is currently 10 points ahead of Labour in the polls and is building a professional political machine in left-behind Britain. Moreover, Farage is abandoning his residual Thatcherite politics in favour of Marine le Pen-style state activism. Starmer's embrace of hardline immigration policies this week shows just how frightened he is of Reform.
The provision of fresh-baked croissants to the citizens of Battersea and beyond is a cause for celebration. So is the profusion of first-class restaurants and wineries. But other aspects of Britain's ongoing Frenchification are more worrying. The French may work relatively short hours, but they are also among the most productive workers in the world. The British, by contrast, are likely to combine short hours with low productivity. The French have a long tradition of staffing state companies with the brightest products of their educational system. The British tend to staff them with either local bureaucrats or failed businesspeople.
There is a big difference between Britain's accidental and gerrymandered presidential system and France's carefully crafted one. The British prime minister works in a rickety town house rather than the Élysée Palace and is sorely lacking in support staff. He must also perform residual but time-consuming parliamentary duties such as appearing at prime minister's question time, a ritual that no less a public performer than Tony Blair described as 'nerve-racking, discombobulating, nail-biting, bowel-moving, terror-inspiring, courage-draining'.
Hence a troubling dynamic in Britain's national transformation: Our embrace of both presidential politics and national champions will almost certainly speed up the advance of Nigel Farage and his band of gilets jaunes. But at least we'll have a better supply of croissants and coffee to comfort us as we watch Vichy rise. BLOOMBERG
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