Resentful low earning graduates were the backbone of Corbyn and Bernie Sanders support, and here too with Mélenchon. Filling the heads of school leavers of mediocre ability with ideological nonsense in poor quality universities in order to leave them without skills of use to the economy must the most destructive waste of resources in peacetime since the Ancient Egyptians piled up precious goods in burial chambers. If 40% of Mélenchon’s support was Muslim, then 9% of all voters were Muslims voting for Mélenchon, and he got over 60% of the Muslim vote. The hard left’s support is concentrated in two demographics which are rising as a proportion of the total. That is the future.
While we have plenty of “degree inflation” here in the US, I don’t think that conflicts with the reality that employment opportunities for the young are generally worse than for our parents.
Francis MacGabhann
2 years ago
This reads to me like a very long-winded way of saying that France is screwed. It’s divided between the greedy (Macron voters), the stupid (Melenchon’s voters) and the rest (Le Pen). The greedy and the stupid are varieties of Eloi, and the continue to live off the misery of the Morlocks. Since greed is a form of stupidity, the Eloi will flock together in the second round, but since collectively they contribute noting, it’s questionable how long the Morlocks will continue to carry them. It ain’t looking good, long term.
R Wright
2 years ago
“But as soon as she mentions banning the Islamic headscarf, she creates a separate category of French citizens who are not really French, but who are immigrants and a burden. This disqualifies her economic reconstruction platform”
This is where the wheels begin to fall off a previously high quality essay.
Ri Bradach
2 years ago
The picture shows him shaking the hand of an elderly gentleman. That man is a British Paratrooper, not a Frenchman.
It was men like this whose enormous sacrifices that Macron and the EU abused when Britain voted to leave the EU. In exchange for millions of our young men dying in two wars we did not start to save France and Europe from despotism, when we voted to restore democracy we were treated as an enemy.
The EU and most of all Macron’s France declared economic war on Britain for daring to remove itself from the yoke of European Commission rule.
Never ever forget that.
Let no British blood or penny ever be spilt for these people ever again.
In typical Macron style, he is not shaking the veteran’s hands. He’s ingratiatingly put his hands on the old gentleman’s shoulders. I hope the old boy told him “don’t tutoyer me”.
Zero time for Macron. But there were a good proportion of courageous, honourable Frenchmen and women who fought on alongside us during WWII. They were not all collaborators like Mitterand.
At the same time, whenever we beat ourselves up about Munich (1938), we would do well to remember that it was the French – and not the UK – who has the treaty commitment to come to Czechoslovakia’s defence.
For goodness sake, it’s clear Macron is affectionately embracing the veteran. He is showing his sincere admiration for him. And the veteran appreciates that. And Macron may well have just shaken the veteran’s hand, too, a second before.
I am irritatingly criticising you, no doubt.
A person should also remind themselves that they personally were not on these battlefields. When assigning collective guilt to entire continents, there is a danger of claiming personal credit for victories won by one’s ancestors. The English are notorious for it. “How WE won at Normandy, how WE won at El Alamein…” etc.
Who’s assigning guilt to entire continents? I was too young for the war, but my father fought in France and Belgium in 1940, returning in 1944, after which he fought through those countries again into the Netherlands and Germany.
And the British, Canadians, US and a few others did win in Normandy and at El Alamein, etc., and a good number of Irish citizens also fought, despite their country’s neutrality.
(And no, I don’t ignore the enormous effort by Russia, after 1941, who justifiably remember it, without being labelled ‘notorious’.)
We, the British servicemen and women. Every generation of my family have served for hundreds of years. In WW2 both my Grandfather (Hurricane, Typhoon, Tempest pilot) and my grandmother (WRAF radar plotter) fought in the war.
The first, my Great Grandfather fought in all of the major battles, 1915-1918, meeting my grandmother, an army nurse whilst recovering from being shot at Ypres.
So yes, WE and bloody hard earned too. “We”, a defined people, however much you hate us, is a legitimate term. Please keep your anti-English pathetic drivel to yourself and enjoy the final act of surrendering your own sovereignty when the EU ends the Celtic Tiger tax game.
I have to say that is probably the most delusional rant I’ve ever read on UnHerd.
I was a Remainer, who, nonetheless, now accepts we are out of the EU, probably for at least a generation, but the idea that the EU declared economic war on us is, truly, absurd. When the country voted for Brexit, in 2016, there had been little or no discussion as to what that meant; the idea that Brexit = ‘hard Brexit’ only really emerged after the 2019 election.
As for the EU, it’s a club: when you are in it, you follow the rules; if you choose to leave, then you cannot, reasonably, expect to enjoy the same access and privileges as before. Tell me what is difficult to understand about that?
If it is so, can you explain how Greece join the Euro when failing to meet membership criteria?
What about Lisbon treaty and various referendums which went against it but project carried on regardless?
What about appeasing Russia and allowing Germany to sign to Nord Stream 1 and 2 (economic Ribentrop-Molotov pact)?
So yes, EU is the disfunctional club where members votes are ignored by executive.
Who said Brexit meant having the “same access and privileges”? Wake up!!! Nobody expected that, but a FTA like Canada’s was denied purely so that the EU (France) could wage economic war and split the UK using a 1991 agreement as if it were signed AFTER Lisbon, 18 years later.
Rasmus Fogh
2 years ago
Very interesting electoral analysis – slightly less impressive underlying politics.
If it is a problem that an ever larger proportion of the population is pensioners, to the point where they can overwhelm the working population electorally – what is wrong with raising the pension age? Increase the block of workers, reduce the block of pensioners, have more people pay taxes to pay for the pension costs? If you refuse raise the pension age because that is unjust – how can you think it is just to take away the political rights of the old?
It’s not right, and shouldn’t be considered. Eventually as these older people die off they’ll cease to be a majority, and the millennials who have been done over constantly will be a more important voting bloc and be able to dictate policy.
Generally the baby boomer generation has been incredibly selfish in my opinion, selling off and privatising everything built by the silent generation before them, then doing away with every leg up they received to get a start in life for the generations that followed, at least in the English speaking world anyway, and in France it appears they’re happy to raise the retirement age now that they’re safely retired. However the fact is once they’re no longer an important voting bloc the younger generations will be free to set policy as they please, and the oldies that are left can’t really have any complaints
It is fantasy to imagine that a country with a life expectancy of 83 years can sustain a retirement age of 62 or lower. Refusing to raise it now will mean no pension at all for people later.
I’m not arguing with that, as you say to support a longer retirement you either have to work later or significantly increase taxes. My point was that the elderly seem happy to force the youngsters to work later now that they themselves will no longer be affected. However God forbid them having to put their hand in their pocket to assist the youngsters
Billy Bob – have you heard of ‘the bank of mum and dad’? Lots of people assist their children, now that the kids have student loans, and housing is ridiculously expensive. I read a comment the other day on a blog about the coming Australian election – it said “People over 70 shouldn’t have the vote, after all, the future isn’t theirs”, and I thought “he has a point”.
I don’t like my entire generation being blamed for everything, there are a lot of poor baby boomers, particularly women who got divorced in middle age. We have wealth in the form of a house, but you have to live somewhere. Many of us were at work long before compulsory superannuation, so not a lot of money in retirement. I passed pension age (it’s 67 in Australia) years ago and one of the reasons I’m still at work is because the world economic situation seems pretty fragile – I would be frightened to have only a pension to depend on. So maybe the pension age will become increasingly irrelevant – ordinary working class people will work ’till they drop!
Name me one policy the baby boomer generation voted for/enacted that benefitted a generation other than their own.
I’ve seen them privatise all the utilities the silent generation built up and pocket the cash, sell themselves all the council houses for cheap and never replace them, benefit from either free further education or on the job training then do away with it once it was their turn to pay for the following cohort. They’ve put nothing away for their end of life care yet expect the pension to rise faster than average wages. They have the cheek to label the youngsters as entitled yet while seeming to believe the world owes them a favour.
Just because a few are in the position to help a family member doesn’t change that fact
But its not the Boomer generation who stand to benefit from a refusal to raise the retirement age – it is those born in the 1960s and perhaps the early 1970s. Anyone aged under 50 is exposed to the risk that the money will quite literally have run out by the time their turn comes.
There are dozens of such policies – at the start of my voting life I was able to vote for Australia having a national health service, and not long ago I was able to vote for Western Australia having Voluntary Assisted Dying – along the way I could vote for same sex marriage and all the other anti-discrimination laws. So much of the environmental legislation, and schemes such as Landcare, were baby-boomer projects. Native title for Aborigines. A national disability support program. On and on …
I agree with many of your examples, and why/how people can be persuaded to vote against their best interests is an interesting topic, but really, money talks in politics. Given the decline in power of unions, churches etc. the influence of money in politics is greater than ever. So, don’t blame an entire generation, follow the money and see who benefited from those decisions.
It’s ridiculous to blame “a generation” but Billy Bob does have the right of it, conceptually speaking. It’s true that the previous generation has done a lot for environmental protection and so on, but their resources depended on polluting the environment in the first place. We now call travelling by train “sustainable” simply because it pollutes the environment less than taking an airplane would. We have practically nothing that’s actually sustainable, and much of it stems from a refusal of funding it, because it never was “cool” enough to care.
Of course, it’s not any single person’s fault, but simply the overall air of consumerism, materialism and self-centeredness. If everybody is under the pressure of selling crap to the next guy, then obviously something has to give. And that something is both the environment and the coming generation.
“Eventually as these older people die off they’ll cease to be a majority, and the millennials who have been done over constantly will be a more important voting bloc and be able to dictate policy.” So, the old people die off but the ‘millenials’ don’t get any older and become retirees themselves? And when they get to the age of 63, they will be happy to vote to raise the retirement age to 65?
What they choose to vote for is up to them, I was merely saying they’ll be able to selfishly vote to look after their own interests much like the older generations have done
Nothing to add to the interesting spread of comments below other than observation – the elderly in an EU country are stealing the future of the young? That’s going to blow the minds of some UK journalists.
Jon Hawksley
2 years ago
A very informative essay that is illuminating on the political divides in France. The opinions of the author do though show through. There is no mention of the brakes stopping businesses from being more enterprising – the unions, the taxation of small businesses and the black economy. As to the politics of the elderly this is not necessarily self interest – they have seen what happens with the extreme left and right.
Norman Powers
2 years ago
Hmm. Overall a very high quality essay and thanks to Sophie for (presumably) the useful maps and graphs. Most of this feels plausible and directionally correct.
I was nodding along until the part about the part about how Le Pen’s re-industrialization platform makes no sense because she’s anti-Muslim immigrant. This is the first section where I couldn’t follow the argument. I feel nearly alone in not having any particularly strong opinions on Islam but my understanding is that Muslim immigrants in France are mostly either unemployed or in low skill work. “Reindustrialization” is a socialist academic concept that I don’t think makes much sense to talk about anyway, but if we accept the premise for a moment, then the people France would need to reindustrialize are generally highly trained workers with the skills needed to design and run factories. To be profitable in a country like France that has sky-high labour costs, industry would need to be highly automated in any case. So putting any issues of morality aside I don’t see any obvious contradiction between wanting reindustrialization and wanting to restrict certain types of immigrants.
The equivalent argument for Macron makes more sense, but again, takes as a premise that France would need to be protectionist within the EU, in order to …. uhm … ensure the supply of masks the next time some mad scientists unleash a virus into the wild? The reason the west had to import masks from Asia is not due to some generalized lack of industry but because masks don’t appear to work, so organic demand is low. In fact at the very start of the pandemic I remember reading about the only company in the USA that could manufacture masks. They were being asked by the government to scale up and they were refusing because they’d been through public health hysterias before, and had been burned before when sudden obsessions with masks evaporated overnight.
Overall this essay seems strongest when analysing the trends in the French electoral system, and weakest on economic issues. Perhaps not surprising given that despite the talk of faux-capitalism, the author is a French academic.
Dustshoe Richinrut
2 years ago
The young might soon end up a more intolerant, intransigent bloc than those voters over 65. After all, many of the young have indeed learned about the world from their parents and grandparents.
Those who are 70 now were young as recently as the disco-days of the 70s. They have been good and reasonable people in the main, I imagine. But France, I fear, is going to go the way of America in 2020. What happened in America, with the numerous violent outbursts on the streets two summers ago, is but a harbinger of the future. American culture is now carried around by the young French in their pocket.
France is too hoity-toity for its own good. It pretends to be smart and radical when it simply is not. When the Notre Dame cathedral was damaged by a fire, the country brought out its accordions and lamented the damage to the “soul” of France. That’s just Russian levels of feeling sorry for themselves: most secularists probably only mention the word “soul” once a year, at best. It was a hard job finding the word Catholic or even Christian in the Guardian’s account of the fire. But the word “gung-ho” did crop up, I recall reading, in one Guardian piece on the fire, in 2019.
Well, maybe France is being smart and radical when it no longer speaks the language of the very old (who have become wiser through experience).
Boris, on the back of party-gate, and his (sobering) trip to Kiev, at least gave out an Easter message. Just to utter a Christian message may seem like a tall order for even the leader of a country that is nominally Christian.
I don’t know about France. Do France’s presidents and prime ministers issue an Easter message? Was one issued by Macron?
Has one ever been issued by Macron?
They tweet, people do, about all sorts of jolly things. But civilisation is barely noticed in its bid to be acknowledged. Civilisation jumps up and down in vain.
polidori redux
2 years ago
“France appears to be fairly united culturally, far less obsessed with Islam than expected…” And yet this article is peppered with references to Islam. I wonder who the obsessed one is.
Arnold Grutt
2 years ago
“Class contempt, which is real, does not have the intensity in France that it does in England”
In the UK, class-contempt is mainly the left hating those who do not belong to its university-spawned millennial movements. It is simply not true that the right foment class-hatred in Britain. This was shown by the Brexit vote, where the greatest contempt was levelled against the Leave contingent by exactly this nouveau-‘educated’ cohort. There was plentiful religious bigotry flying around from those people too, especially in Scotland.
Last edited 2 years ago by Arnold Grutt
Simon Diggins
2 years ago
Sack your picture editor, O UnHerd!
The photo is of President Macron with a British Para Veteran. It’s probably even been printed the wrong way round; most veterans wear lapel badges on the left – tho’ this gentleman may be different.
Laura Sharpe
1 year ago
“we have no equivalent to the expression “chavs”. Yes you do! “Racaille”,“beauf”, for example.
Last edited 1 year ago by Laura Sharpe
Jorge Espinha
1 year ago
It’s something I’ve been thinking for a while, once you retired you should lose your right to vote in national elections. Also there shouldn’t be any active politicians older than 65. (PS: I will 50 this year)
Resentful low earning graduates were the backbone of Corbyn and Bernie Sanders support, and here too with Mélenchon. Filling the heads of school leavers of mediocre ability with ideological nonsense in poor quality universities in order to leave them without skills of use to the economy must the most destructive waste of resources in peacetime since the Ancient Egyptians piled up precious goods in burial chambers. If 40% of Mélenchon’s support was Muslim, then 9% of all voters were Muslims voting for Mélenchon, and he got over 60% of the Muslim vote. The hard left’s support is concentrated in two demographics which are rising as a proportion of the total. That is the future.
While we have plenty of “degree inflation” here in the US, I don’t think that conflicts with the reality that employment opportunities for the young are generally worse than for our parents.
This reads to me like a very long-winded way of saying that France is screwed. It’s divided between the greedy (Macron voters), the stupid (Melenchon’s voters) and the rest (Le Pen). The greedy and the stupid are varieties of Eloi, and the continue to live off the misery of the Morlocks. Since greed is a form of stupidity, the Eloi will flock together in the second round, but since collectively they contribute noting, it’s questionable how long the Morlocks will continue to carry them. It ain’t looking good, long term.
“But as soon as she mentions banning the Islamic headscarf, she creates a separate category of French citizens who are not really French, but who are immigrants and a burden. This disqualifies her economic reconstruction platform”
This is where the wheels begin to fall off a previously high quality essay.
The picture shows him shaking the hand of an elderly gentleman. That man is a British Paratrooper, not a Frenchman.
It was men like this whose enormous sacrifices that Macron and the EU abused when Britain voted to leave the EU. In exchange for millions of our young men dying in two wars we did not start to save France and Europe from despotism, when we voted to restore democracy we were treated as an enemy.
The EU and most of all Macron’s France declared economic war on Britain for daring to remove itself from the yoke of European Commission rule.
Never ever forget that.
Let no British blood or penny ever be spilt for these people ever again.
In typical Macron style, he is not shaking the veteran’s hands. He’s ingratiatingly put his hands on the old gentleman’s shoulders. I hope the old boy told him “don’t tutoyer me”.
Zero time for Macron. But there were a good proportion of courageous, honourable Frenchmen and women who fought on alongside us during WWII. They were not all collaborators like Mitterand.
At the same time, whenever we beat ourselves up about Munich (1938), we would do well to remember that it was the French – and not the UK – who has the treaty commitment to come to Czechoslovakia’s defence.
For goodness sake, it’s clear Macron is affectionately embracing the veteran. He is showing his sincere admiration for him. And the veteran appreciates that. And Macron may well have just shaken the veteran’s hand, too, a second before.
I am irritatingly criticising you, no doubt.
A person should also remind themselves that they personally were not on these battlefields. When assigning collective guilt to entire continents, there is a danger of claiming personal credit for victories won by one’s ancestors. The English are notorious for it. “How WE won at Normandy, how WE won at El Alamein…” etc.
Who’s assigning guilt to entire continents? I was too young for the war, but my father fought in France and Belgium in 1940, returning in 1944, after which he fought through those countries again into the Netherlands and Germany.
And the British, Canadians, US and a few others did win in Normandy and at El Alamein, etc., and a good number of Irish citizens also fought, despite their country’s neutrality.
(And no, I don’t ignore the enormous effort by Russia, after 1941, who justifiably remember it, without being labelled ‘notorious’.)
We, the British servicemen and women. Every generation of my family have served for hundreds of years. In WW2 both my Grandfather (Hurricane, Typhoon, Tempest pilot) and my grandmother (WRAF radar plotter) fought in the war.
The first, my Great Grandfather fought in all of the major battles, 1915-1918, meeting my grandmother, an army nurse whilst recovering from being shot at Ypres.
So yes, WE and bloody hard earned too. “We”, a defined people, however much you hate us, is a legitimate term. Please keep your anti-English pathetic drivel to yourself and enjoy the final act of surrendering your own sovereignty when the EU ends the Celtic Tiger tax game.
I have to say that is probably the most delusional rant I’ve ever read on UnHerd.
I was a Remainer, who, nonetheless, now accepts we are out of the EU, probably for at least a generation, but the idea that the EU declared economic war on us is, truly, absurd. When the country voted for Brexit, in 2016, there had been little or no discussion as to what that meant; the idea that Brexit = ‘hard Brexit’ only really emerged after the 2019 election.
As for the EU, it’s a club: when you are in it, you follow the rules; if you choose to leave, then you cannot, reasonably, expect to enjoy the same access and privileges as before. Tell me what is difficult to understand about that?
If it is so, can you explain how Greece join the Euro when failing to meet membership criteria?
What about Lisbon treaty and various referendums which went against it but project carried on regardless?
What about appeasing Russia and allowing Germany to sign to Nord Stream 1 and 2 (economic Ribentrop-Molotov pact)?
So yes, EU is the disfunctional club where members votes are ignored by executive.
Who said Brexit meant having the “same access and privileges”? Wake up!!! Nobody expected that, but a FTA like Canada’s was denied purely so that the EU (France) could wage economic war and split the UK using a 1991 agreement as if it were signed AFTER Lisbon, 18 years later.
Very interesting electoral analysis – slightly less impressive underlying politics.
If it is a problem that an ever larger proportion of the population is pensioners, to the point where they can overwhelm the working population electorally – what is wrong with raising the pension age? Increase the block of workers, reduce the block of pensioners, have more people pay taxes to pay for the pension costs? If you refuse raise the pension age because that is unjust – how can you think it is just to take away the political rights of the old?
It’s not right, and shouldn’t be considered. Eventually as these older people die off they’ll cease to be a majority, and the millennials who have been done over constantly will be a more important voting bloc and be able to dictate policy.
Generally the baby boomer generation has been incredibly selfish in my opinion, selling off and privatising everything built by the silent generation before them, then doing away with every leg up they received to get a start in life for the generations that followed, at least in the English speaking world anyway, and in France it appears they’re happy to raise the retirement age now that they’re safely retired. However the fact is once they’re no longer an important voting bloc the younger generations will be free to set policy as they please, and the oldies that are left can’t really have any complaints
It is fantasy to imagine that a country with a life expectancy of 83 years can sustain a retirement age of 62 or lower. Refusing to raise it now will mean no pension at all for people later.
I’m not arguing with that, as you say to support a longer retirement you either have to work later or significantly increase taxes. My point was that the elderly seem happy to force the youngsters to work later now that they themselves will no longer be affected. However God forbid them having to put their hand in their pocket to assist the youngsters
Billy Bob – have you heard of ‘the bank of mum and dad’? Lots of people assist their children, now that the kids have student loans, and housing is ridiculously expensive. I read a comment the other day on a blog about the coming Australian election – it said “People over 70 shouldn’t have the vote, after all, the future isn’t theirs”, and I thought “he has a point”.
I don’t like my entire generation being blamed for everything, there are a lot of poor baby boomers, particularly women who got divorced in middle age. We have wealth in the form of a house, but you have to live somewhere. Many of us were at work long before compulsory superannuation, so not a lot of money in retirement. I passed pension age (it’s 67 in Australia) years ago and one of the reasons I’m still at work is because the world economic situation seems pretty fragile – I would be frightened to have only a pension to depend on. So maybe the pension age will become increasingly irrelevant – ordinary working class people will work ’till they drop!
Name me one policy the baby boomer generation voted for/enacted that benefitted a generation other than their own.
I’ve seen them privatise all the utilities the silent generation built up and pocket the cash, sell themselves all the council houses for cheap and never replace them, benefit from either free further education or on the job training then do away with it once it was their turn to pay for the following cohort. They’ve put nothing away for their end of life care yet expect the pension to rise faster than average wages. They have the cheek to label the youngsters as entitled yet while seeming to believe the world owes them a favour.
Just because a few are in the position to help a family member doesn’t change that fact
But its not the Boomer generation who stand to benefit from a refusal to raise the retirement age – it is those born in the 1960s and perhaps the early 1970s. Anyone aged under 50 is exposed to the risk that the money will quite literally have run out by the time their turn comes.
There are dozens of such policies – at the start of my voting life I was able to vote for Australia having a national health service, and not long ago I was able to vote for Western Australia having Voluntary Assisted Dying – along the way I could vote for same sex marriage and all the other anti-discrimination laws. So much of the environmental legislation, and schemes such as Landcare, were baby-boomer projects. Native title for Aborigines. A national disability support program. On and on …
I agree with many of your examples, and why/how people can be persuaded to vote against their best interests is an interesting topic, but really, money talks in politics. Given the decline in power of unions, churches etc. the influence of money in politics is greater than ever. So, don’t blame an entire generation, follow the money and see who benefited from those decisions.
It’s ridiculous to blame “a generation” but Billy Bob does have the right of it, conceptually speaking. It’s true that the previous generation has done a lot for environmental protection and so on, but their resources depended on polluting the environment in the first place. We now call travelling by train “sustainable” simply because it pollutes the environment less than taking an airplane would. We have practically nothing that’s actually sustainable, and much of it stems from a refusal of funding it, because it never was “cool” enough to care.
Of course, it’s not any single person’s fault, but simply the overall air of consumerism, materialism and self-centeredness. If everybody is under the pressure of selling crap to the next guy, then obviously something has to give. And that something is both the environment and the coming generation.
“Eventually as these older people die off they’ll cease to be a majority, and the millennials who have been done over constantly will be a more important voting bloc and be able to dictate policy.”
So, the old people die off but the ‘millenials’ don’t get any older and become retirees themselves? And when they get to the age of 63, they will be happy to vote to raise the retirement age to 65?
What they choose to vote for is up to them, I was merely saying they’ll be able to selfishly vote to look after their own interests much like the older generations have done
I rarely agree with you, but this was eloquently put.
Nothing to add to the interesting spread of comments below other than observation – the elderly in an EU country are stealing the future of the young? That’s going to blow the minds of some UK journalists.
A very informative essay that is illuminating on the political divides in France. The opinions of the author do though show through. There is no mention of the brakes stopping businesses from being more enterprising – the unions, the taxation of small businesses and the black economy. As to the politics of the elderly this is not necessarily self interest – they have seen what happens with the extreme left and right.
Hmm. Overall a very high quality essay and thanks to Sophie for (presumably) the useful maps and graphs. Most of this feels plausible and directionally correct.
I was nodding along until the part about the part about how Le Pen’s re-industrialization platform makes no sense because she’s anti-Muslim immigrant. This is the first section where I couldn’t follow the argument. I feel nearly alone in not having any particularly strong opinions on Islam but my understanding is that Muslim immigrants in France are mostly either unemployed or in low skill work. “Reindustrialization” is a socialist academic concept that I don’t think makes much sense to talk about anyway, but if we accept the premise for a moment, then the people France would need to reindustrialize are generally highly trained workers with the skills needed to design and run factories. To be profitable in a country like France that has sky-high labour costs, industry would need to be highly automated in any case. So putting any issues of morality aside I don’t see any obvious contradiction between wanting reindustrialization and wanting to restrict certain types of immigrants.
The equivalent argument for Macron makes more sense, but again, takes as a premise that France would need to be protectionist within the EU, in order to …. uhm … ensure the supply of masks the next time some mad scientists unleash a virus into the wild? The reason the west had to import masks from Asia is not due to some generalized lack of industry but because masks don’t appear to work, so organic demand is low. In fact at the very start of the pandemic I remember reading about the only company in the USA that could manufacture masks. They were being asked by the government to scale up and they were refusing because they’d been through public health hysterias before, and had been burned before when sudden obsessions with masks evaporated overnight.
Overall this essay seems strongest when analysing the trends in the French electoral system, and weakest on economic issues. Perhaps not surprising given that despite the talk of faux-capitalism, the author is a French academic.
The young might soon end up a more intolerant, intransigent bloc than those voters over 65. After all, many of the young have indeed learned about the world from their parents and grandparents.
Those who are 70 now were young as recently as the disco-days of the 70s. They have been good and reasonable people in the main, I imagine. But France, I fear, is going to go the way of America in 2020. What happened in America, with the numerous violent outbursts on the streets two summers ago, is but a harbinger of the future. American culture is now carried around by the young French in their pocket.
France is too hoity-toity for its own good. It pretends to be smart and radical when it simply is not. When the Notre Dame cathedral was damaged by a fire, the country brought out its accordions and lamented the damage to the “soul” of France. That’s just Russian levels of feeling sorry for themselves: most secularists probably only mention the word “soul” once a year, at best. It was a hard job finding the word Catholic or even Christian in the Guardian’s account of the fire. But the word “gung-ho” did crop up, I recall reading, in one Guardian piece on the fire, in 2019.
Well, maybe France is being smart and radical when it no longer speaks the language of the very old (who have become wiser through experience).
Boris, on the back of party-gate, and his (sobering) trip to Kiev, at least gave out an Easter message. Just to utter a Christian message may seem like a tall order for even the leader of a country that is nominally Christian.
I don’t know about France. Do France’s presidents and prime ministers issue an Easter message? Was one issued by Macron?
Has one ever been issued by Macron?
They tweet, people do, about all sorts of jolly things. But civilisation is barely noticed in its bid to be acknowledged. Civilisation jumps up and down in vain.
“France appears to be fairly united culturally, far less obsessed with Islam than expected…”
And yet this article is peppered with references to Islam. I wonder who the obsessed one is.
“Class contempt, which is real, does not have the intensity in France that it does in England”
In the UK, class-contempt is mainly the left hating those who do not belong to its university-spawned millennial movements. It is simply not true that the right foment class-hatred in Britain. This was shown by the Brexit vote, where the greatest contempt was levelled against the Leave contingent by exactly this nouveau-‘educated’ cohort. There was plentiful religious bigotry flying around from those people too, especially in Scotland.
Sack your picture editor, O UnHerd!
The photo is of President Macron with a British Para Veteran. It’s probably even been printed the wrong way round; most veterans wear lapel badges on the left – tho’ this gentleman may be different.
“we have no equivalent to the expression “chavs”. Yes you do! “Racaille”,“beauf”, for example.
It’s something I’ve been thinking for a while, once you retired you should lose your right to vote in national elections. Also there shouldn’t be any active politicians older than 65. (PS: I will 50 this year)