Can Sarko halt France’s decline?

When I first moved to Britain in 1995, after a misspent youth in France, there were few Gallic accents to be heard outside the tourist hotspots. The long-established community in South Kensington had been joined by a growing number of French students at institutions such as the London School of Economics, but that was about it. 

These days the French are everywhere. Tens of thousands of entrepreneurial, ambitious young graduates have moved to London and the south-east of England, fleeing sky-high levels of youth unemployment and a society obsessed with the preservation of the status quo. It’s not just that the 35-hour working week combined with huge social security costs means that it makes little sense for companies to give young, inexperienced workers a try. Equally destructive is France’s crippling burden of tax and public spending, which has squeezed out the private sector and destroyed incentives to work, invest or set up new businesses.

Total public spending accounts for 53.5 per cent of France’s national income; its economy is officially the second most socialist of the wealthy nations after Sweden. Bright French students dream of being top civil servants; no wonder that France is vying with Italy to be the new sick man of Europe, a role recently vacated by Germany.

For those who don’t believe me — and in my experience, that means most readers — the figures are unambiguous. The British economy has outperformed France for many years but the gap has grown significantly over the past decade, helping to fuel the French brain drain. Average annual economic growth between 1982 and 1992 was 2.3 per cent in France, against 2.5 per cent in Britain. Since the recession of the early 1990s, new-found macroeconomic stability and the delayed effect of the free-market reforms of the 1980s allowed the British economy to power ahead.