Chris Proctor – Brainwaves
IN PARIS recently, a Gallic chap told me he didn’t make any distinction between the English and Americans. I bristled like a Vietnamese warthog and proclaimed my Britishness with all the force and fervour of a retired major on Poppy Day. I find being called an American as offensive as David Miliband would consider being called a lefty. I thought about suing the Gaul or attacking him violently. But then I realised that either of these steps would confirm him in his belief that I was American.
Jean-Paul (who I wittily refer to as George-Ringo) said that he only meant in the economic sense. He accepts that British people aren’t American by birth, but he thinks we have their attitude towards money. To advance his argument, he asked if I thought “subsidy” was a good word or a bad one. It’s his litmus test. If you blanch and recoil from the word “subsidy”, you’ve got American tendencies.
We got onto the subject because his family are from the Alps, where his father is a dairy farmer. Without the slightest embarrassment, he says that this is a highly unprofitable business. It’s inconvenient for the market, productivity is low and costs are high, he told me cheerily. The “American” solution is to close them down. The French is to give them a subsidy from the Common Agricultural Policy.
Patiently he explains that, if they weren’t given state funding, no one would farm up the Alps. The result of this would be the end of a part of the traditional French way of life. This, he says, is unthinkable. French history and culture are worth preserving.
It was an uncomfortable conversation, because I realised that we don’t think this way about “English heritage”. This phrase, to us, means being charged an arm and a leg to usher aged relations around old castles or, even worse, formal gardens. It means places where you’re not allowed to step on the grass, cross the rope or take photos; but where you are expected to splash out on tea-towels, bags of dead leaves and bottles of mead.
English heritage is merely a reminder that in the old days the English aristocracy used to be very rich. How times have changed. Now the well-off are much more deserving types, like property developers.
In fact, we don’t care about our heritage. We don’t object to driving past ruins or cathedrals, and revving through the Cotswolds is arguably more enjoyable than using the M4. But so long as we’ve got The Archers, we don’t really need cheese-makers in Lincolnshire. It’s not something we’d be prepared to spend “good money” on.
It’s the same with post offices. We all like the idea of the English village with its local pub, thatched cottage and local post office. It’s part of our tradition. But we’d have to – I’ll have to use the “S” word – subsidise them. So we close them down. We don’t want to end up in the S, do we?
However, it’s not true that we don’t subsidise anything in Britain. The difference is that, while the French are happy to subsidise poor farmers, we are more inclined to subsidise rich industrialists. Richard Branson is a case in point – we hand over massive subsidies to his Virgin and other train operating companies. Before privatisation, the taxpayer used to subsidise British Rail by £1.2 billion. Now we give private companies
£6.3 billion a year.
The kindly British public also subsidises accountants, lawyers and consultants. How do we manage this? Well, the average amount spent by companies to put a bid together for one of the rail franchises is £7 million. This money goes to the merry band above and the costs are picked up by our charitable public in their fares. So it’s not as if we’re mean, is it?
The Scots, I’ve noticed, are rather more French than American in this area. They subsidise the most ludicrous things, such as students undertaking higher education. This is plainly a waste of money. Student numbers, according to our Labour leaders, have actually increased since they introduced tuition fees. This demonstrates that, the less education is subsidised, the more educated people we produce. It is a heartening formula which could well be applied in other areas.
If, for example, we reduced the amount of public money spent on the National Health Service, we would presumably end up with more healthy people. By not helping too much with dental costs, teeth would become stronger. This is the sort of advanced economic thinking the French lack – but it is a lesson that the nice Nicolas Sarkozy seems to have learned from his chums George Bush and Tony Blair.
Hopefully, armed with this information, he will be able to improve the French economy by adhering strictly to the radically successful free market model. You have only to look at (fast and reliable) French trains and their (smooth and wide) roads to see how badly that country is faring. They will progress to our level only when the last cow-minder has been chased off the final French frontier.
