France

Thursday

Hugo Rifkind

Why should our children be more like the French?

I’ve no particular beef with the French, gruesomely tortured beef as it would no doubt be, but I’m a little tired of being told we ought to follow their example with our children. Elizabeth Truss, the normally quite sensible education minister, is the latest culprit. She believes that Britain’s nurseries are chaotic, noisy places. Children would be better prepared for school, she feels, if British nurseries were more like French nurseries, in which toddlers wear couture, click their heels whenever an adult enters the room, and never laugh. I daresay she’s right, just as I’m sure people are often right when they marvel at the flawless behaviour of little French people.

Thursday

Martin Vander Weyer

Thatcher changed the City for the better – but human nature led it astray

‘Margaret had no love for the banks,’ Nigel Lawson wrote in The View from No. 11. The idea that the amoral greed of the City and the banking crisis it fuelled should be blamed on Margaret Thatcher has been much bandied about this week. Let me try to put it in -perspective. In her early years in power, Thatcher thought of the City as another enclave of the ‘wet’ public-school types who so annoyed her in the Conservative party. The high-street banks were, in her view, a complacent cartel that reported over-large profits during the 1981 recession (hence the windfall tax), refused to contribute to Tory coffers, and did nothing to promote recovery.

Monday

Isabel Hardman

David Cameron makes the case for reform in Europe

Germany has elections on the way, Spain is just about holding a lid on its economic crisis while keeping a wary eye on the uphill struggle that its neighbour Portugal faces to avoid a second bailout, and François Hollande has his own political crisis to deal with (and is apparently also mourning the death of a camel). So is now really the best time for David Cameron to pitch up in Madrid, Paris and Berlin to argue for reform of the European Union? The PM visits the first two cities today, with a meeting with Angela Merkel planned for later this week on the same topic.

Friday

Nigel Jones

A tale of two colonels

This week, March 11th, marks the 50th anniversary of the shooting by firing squad near Paris of the last person (so far) to be executed by the state for political offences in France. 36-year-old Lieutenant-Colonel Jean Bastien-Thiry, a brilliant young officer of the French Air Force, was a rocket scientist (he invented the SS-10 anti-tank missile) - involved at the highest levels of France's attempt under President De Gaulle to forge a path independent of US hegemony in developing its own defence capability.

Thursday

Florence Uniacke

Doing it the French way

‘Where have all the great French writers gone?’ the people cry. Or at least they would if anyone was interested in French books. Translated literature claims just 3 per cent of the UK literary market. This number, according to The Economist, is the lowest in the Western world. It is a sign of Britain’s often parochial literary culture, made even more glaring by statistics from France. The French translate a great deal; indeed, according to The New Yorker, many foreign books come to us in English by way of France. Do these facts imply that France is more outward looking? Is French culture being consumed by the American-led Anglosphere? Or does it suggest that France simply lacks major writers? Probably all of the above.

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Europe’s defence budgets may not be noble, but they are at least rational

Gideon Rachmann is unhappy that european defence budgets are still falling: Since 2008, in response to the economic downturn, most big European countries have cut defence spending by 10-15 per cent. The longer-term trends are even more striking. Britain’s Royal Air Force now has just a quarter of the number of combat aircraft it had in the 1970s. The Royal Navy has 19 destroyers and frigates, compared with 69 in 1977. The British army is scheduled to shrink to 82,000 soldiers, its smallest size since the Napoleonic wars. In 1990 Britain had 27 submarines (excluding those that carry ballistic missiles) and France had 17. The two countries now have seven and six respectively.

Saturday

James Forsyth

The Americans accuse the French of being too ambitious in Mali as British involvement grows

It might have been pushed down the news agenda this week by David Cameron’s Europe speech and the bad economic news, but the situation in Mali is offering us a preview of the next decade in international relations. This decade will, William Hague warns in The Times today, be far more dangerous than what we have seen so far this century. This is a sobering statement when you consider that in the last 13 years we have had 9/11, 7/7, Iraq and Afghanistan. One of the striking things about the Mali mission is it shows how the US is far less interested in playing the role if global policemen these days. The New York Times reports today that the Obama administration thinks that the French aims in Mali are too ambitious.

Tuesday

Martin Bright

There is nothing new about Islamism in Africa

The Algerian hostage crisis is over and the Prime Minister has warned that the focus of the al-Qaeda’s franchise has shifted westwards. In his statement on the situation, he was channelling Tony Blair, which at least makes a change from channelling the Foreign Office. But the initial reaction from Downing Street was deeply unimpressive. The BBC’s Nick Robinson quoted a nameless, sneering voice, apparently exasperated at the Algerian response to the crisis. It would be interesting to know whether this patronising individual had ever spent any time working outside SW1 or had any idea that the Algerian people have lived on the frontline of the struggle with violent Islamists for more than 20 years.

Saturday

James Forsyth

Can the West solve a problem like Mali?

I fear that we are all going to have to learn a lot about Mali and the Sahel—and fast. It is rapidly becoming the latest front in the war on terror. Or, to be more precise, the West’s attempt to prevent the emergence of ungoverned spaces that can be exploited by Al Qaeda and its offshoots. The New York Times today has a good primer on the challenge facing the French in Mali: “The French are fighting to preserve the integrity of a country that is divided in half, of a state that is broken. They are fighting for the survival of an interim government with no democratic legitimacy that took power in the aftermath of a coup.

Thursday

Shiraz Maher

Mali could be the gamble that defines Hollande’s presidency

The crisis in Mali is yet another unintended consequence of the Arab Spring. Specifically, they are a result of the revolution in Libya, where Tuareg rebels who supported Gaddafi were forced to flee after his downfall. Heavily armed and regrouping in Mali, they created the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) which effectively ended the government’s control over the north. Jihadist groups aligned with al-Qaeda then swooped in and established a semi-autonomous Islamic state in the north. As they pushed south it looked as if they might capture all of Mali, prompting interim President Dioncounda Traore to ask for French assistance. Francois Hollande responded by launching Operation Serval with overwhelming public support both at home and abroad.

Monday

Isabel Hardman

François Hollande: Ed Miliband’s embarrassing friend

Time was when Ed Miliband had plenty to say about François Hollande. When the new French President celebrated his victory in May, the Labour leader praised Hollande for his 'determination to help create a Europe of growth and jobs, in a way that is responsible and sustainable'. He added: 'This new leadership is sorely needed as Europe seeks to escape from austerity. And it matters to Britain.' Then, Miliband was keen to work together with his new friend Hollande. Just a few months down the line, though, Labour has a bit less to say about how the French president is a shining example of the centre-left showing leadership and hope in Europe. First there was the noisy exodus of top earners from France ahead of the introduction of Hollande's flagship 75 per cent tax.

Tuesday

Cs Mith

An assassination at Christmas

In the upper outer corridor of the Summer Palace, with its views of the palm fringed courtyard below, the young man was waiting with his gun. It was a no frills 7.65 Ruby automatic pistol, one of thousands a Spanish small arms manufacturer had supplied the French Army during the First World. Some of the offices along the narrow corridor were already deserted for the holiday. Nonetheless he had been assured that, however long his Christmas Eve lunch, the admiral would be back because he would want to read his latest telegrams. At about 3.30pm he heard footsteps, the murmur of voices then, rather surprisingly perhaps, laughter.

Saturday

Matthew Sinclair

Why do-gooding ‘sin taxes’ always stink of politics

Nutella may have been created by Italians, but it is the French who really love it. The hazelnut spread is a fantastically popular accompaniment for everything from bread for breakfast to crêpes for a delicious dessert. Yet the French Senate, in its infinite wisdom, decided that Nutella should be taxed. The proposal was voted through the Senate, before being stopped by a very unlikely coalition of Communists and conservatives. The plan to impose a ‘sin tax’ on Nutella in France was obviously ludicrous; but it was also full of politics. Sin taxes and green taxes may look like an efficient intervention on an economist’s blackboard; but they never live up to the wide-eyed optimism of enthusiastic technocrats. They always end in an ugly political stitch-up.

Friday

David Blackburn

Europe’s new iron curtain

The last 24 hours have yielded no agreement in Europe, and they have seen David Cameron’s ambitions decline (he appears resigned to the fact that EU spending will not be limited to 886bn euros, his original objective); but they have also demonstrated that Britain is far from alone at the diplomatic table. David Cameron has been able to forge pragmatic alliances and exert diplomatic pressure precisely. For example, his latest tactic at the budget discussions is to appeal to the downtrodden nations of southern Europe by insisting that the EU’s bureaucracy take its own medicine by raising retirement age and cutting jobs and reducing the final salary pension cap.

Friday

James Forsyth

The EU wins the Nobel Peace Prize

Today is not April the first; but the European Union has indeed won the Nobel Peace Prize. It is a bizarre decision given what is going on in Europe right now. Watching the reaction of the Greek crowd to Angela Merkel on her visit there this week, it was hard not to worry that the European project was now a threat to peace and stability on the continent. To be sure, France and Germany have not gone to war again since 1945. But to chalk that up solely to the European Union is a profound misreading of history. I suspect that the decision to award the prize to the European Union was a product of the desire of the Norwegian elite to rebuke the people there for not wanting to join the European Union. They are raging against the dying of the light.

Friday

Fleur Macdonald

Richard Millet and the nihilism of multiculturalism

It’s the last day of banned book week but perhaps we should spare a thought for banned editors. An editor at Éditions Gallimard, who worked on Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones, recently published three essays (with another house). The first, an account of his amorous adventures in Amsterdam, and the second, ‘Ghostly Language’, are, according to the author, to be kept in mind when tackling the final essay ‘Antiracism as the Literary Terror’ and the appendage, his pièce de resistance, ‘The Literary Eulogy of Anders Breivik’. That, in sum, is why Richard Millet is – for all the wrong reasons – one of the most famous essayists in France right now.

Wednesday

Miranda France

Frank Johnson, a magnum and me

The 1996 Spectator/ Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize was won by Miranda France. Here, she shares her experience of winning the award and visiting the Spectator office and then-editor Frank Johnson to get her £3,000 cheque.   Miranda France has since had four books published. Her Shiva Naipaul-winning entry, 'Bad Times in Buenos Aires', can be read here. To find out more about the Shiva Naipaul award, and how you can enter, click here.     I clearly remember the day I won the Shiva Naipaul prize in 1996. My husband and I were renting a place off London’s south circular, a slightly grim maisonette where cushions were attached to the chairs with velcro. Often we got attached to the velcro too, and it could feel like a really big effort to get off the sofa.

Thursday

Clarissa Tan

The Robin Hood tax, unlike Olympic archery, won’t hit its target

The Robin Hood tax has galloped into France, and once again Britain is being pressured to introduce the same thing in its financial sector. It's a thankless job defending the City at the moment, what with UK banks mired in one scandal after another and Libor-gate still unresolved, but the UK must stand firm in rejecting a tax that, in the words of George Osborne, would be 'economic suicide for Britain'. François Hollande has slapped a 0.2 per cent levy on share trading in France, a precursor to a wider European law. Technically a financial transactions tax, 'Robin Hood' taxes are so-called because they aim to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor.

Thursday

Clarissa Tan

‘Communism’ vs socialism

Two bits of interesting news yesterday: 1. France – while the eurozone is in financial meltdown – is allowing some of its workers to retire early; 2. China – while the eurozone is in financial meltdown – is on a shopping spree, buying European assets on the cheap. Perhaps there we have, in a nutshell, the pattern of what is to follow in the coming months. Francois Hollande’s lowering of the pension age by two years to 60 applies to only a small class of workers, but it appears to be just the start of a slew of changes to employment laws — today, his government announced it would make it more expensive for companies to lay off workers.

Thursday

Edie Lush

EXCLUSIVE – Giscard d’Estaing: Hollande will fail

Valéry Giscard d’Estaing is an energetic 86-year old. When we meet in Paris, for the first interview he’s given since the Socialists took power earlier this month, the former French president is fresh off the plane from a hunting trip in Namibia. Soon, he’ll hop on another flight bound for China, where he heads a think tank.   Giscard still holds the record for being the youngest president of the Fifth Republic – he was 48 when he took the keys to the Élysée. But there’s another claim to fame he’ll be glad to have relinquished - until Sarkozy’s defeat, he was the only recent leader not to win a second term.