WHY CHAUVINISM WORKS FOR THE FRENCH

Michael Gove says that Tony Blair is wrong to attack economic intransigence across the Channel: France's potent mixture of masculinity and patriotism makes for happy families and a low divorce rate

IT IS a truth universally acknowledged that a prime minister in possession of a good majority must be in want of an enemy. And Tony Blair has now found his foe. Where so many of his predecessors have. Across the Channel.

The Prime Minister's last autonomous political act before embarking on his fourweek, four-country vacation was a remarkably forthright attack on the land in which he has holidayed so happily in the past. In an interview he gave while on his tour of Latin America, Mr Blair directed a Nelsonian broadside against the Frenchies.

The Gauls, he declared, were the footdragging, high-spending, reform-resisting, market-rigging, tariff-raising, industry-protecting, peasant-subsidising, dirty men of Europe. He chided the French for their failure to embrace the bracing winds of le Blairisme and patronised them with all the haughtiness of a Michelin-starred sommelier informing a guest that he cannot continue to struggle with the wine list on his own.

'In the end France will accept, I believe, the case for change and the economic reform process in Europe. It will accept that it is sensible to change.' Sir will find that Bordeaux is a poor choice for fish, allow me to suggest a better course. But why should the French allow M. Blair to suggest, indeed dictate, the need for his sort of 'change'? Why must they accept his 'economic reform process'?

Just because the Prime Minister spent part of his gap year washing up in a Parisian bistro, and part of last year in a friend's agreeable villa in Provence, this doesn't qualify him to lecture the French. Far from insisting that they have to follow us, maybe we in Britain should accept that we can learn from, or at least learn to respect, the French.

It may seem odd to some that a Eurosceptic journalist writing in a Eurosceptic journal should laud foreign lands. But the essence of Euroscepticism is not hostility or suspicion towards foreigners, let alone a haughty dismissal of other nation states. Funnily enough, it's the supporters of greater European integration. from Mr Blair to Oswald Mosley, who seem happiest casting aspersions on aliens.

Euroscepticism, by contrast, is motivated by a wariness towards that process of integration which increasingly robs nation states of their special, cherishable characteristics. And there are many characteristics of the French nation at which we can cast an envious, cherishing eye.

France has long-established superiority in providing the two essentials of life — food and medicine. There has long been a consensus among Britain's haute bourgeoisie that we can learn from both France's bistro culture and its pluralist approach to healthcare.

There are, however, other, more contentious areas where we can look at the French exception and ask if we in the United Kingdom might not be missing something. Something rather big. Might it not be the case that the French are right to resist precisely the economic changes that Mr Blair is pressing on them?

For at least two decades the prevailing Anglo-Saxon wisdom has been in favour of letting failing businesses, especially the heavier industries and the smaller farms, go to the wall. The principle of creative destruction, the Darwinian notion that the weakest commercial concerns should not be propped up, for that only saps the strength of the whole economy, has become an almost unchallenged presumption. Lame ducks need strangling, not swaddling.

The consequence of this policy has been the rapid decline of an indigenous British car industry, shipbuilding industry, steel industry, coal industry and civil aviation industry. The departure of British Leyland, the silence on the Tyne, the ripping out of Consett's heart, the closing of Yorkshire's black seams, are all mourned, but their demise is considered inevitable. The cost of supporting them, and their employees, was too heavy a burden on the economy. The capital and labour committed to these enterprises had to be liberated.

And it is hard to argue that Britain has not benefited economically from that liberation. We have enjoyed steady growth since the mid-1980s, employment has increased to more than 70 per cent of the working-age population, and the old heavy industries have been supplanted by new, sunrise enterprises and the expansion of the service sector. It is, as I said, hard to argue against the wider promulgation of these apparently benign trends. But let me try. And let me pray in aid the words of Mr Blair.

Speaking in the House of Commons on 14 May 1997, Mr Blair deployed one of his favourite 'killer facts'. It was, according to the Tory social security spokesman David Willetts, 'probably the statistic most frequently used by the government since coming to office'. The Prime Minister complained to the House that, after 18 years of Tory rule, 'almost one in five households in Britain have no one in work'.

Mr Blair may then have been seeking to undermine the Tories' record of economic growth for his own, partisan reasons by fastening on just one statistic. But the problem he chose to highlight was, and is, far from marginal. For behind that single statistic lurks the untold story of Britain's economic emasculation — a collective cuckolding to which the French have, so far. put up a far more successful resistance.

The reason why Britain simultaneously succeeded in finding jobs for 70 per cent of its people of working age while also leaving one in five households without anyone working is a consequence of the huge cultural shift in the type of individual in employment and the resultant social changes. The decline of traditional industries led to the destruction of long-established patterns of employment. In particular it saw manual, semi-skilled and skilled male workers in their middle years thrown out of the old jobs which gave them security and social prestige, while new jobs were increasingly taken up by the young and, especially, by women. This process might be called the burial of Bevin and the apotheosis of Cherie.

As David Willetts has noted, 'The traditional make manual worker has been left behind. The glue of financial dependence on a paterfamilias earning a "family wage" has disappeared as instead young people leave home and make their own way in the world relatively early. Women who find work are less dependent on their partners. Britain has high rates for divorce and female participation in work.'

That process, which has seen the traditional breadwinner lose out and families become more fragile, has been given retrospective justification by a belief in historic inevitability every bit as rigid as any Marxist doctrine. The economic forces which brought this social convulsion about are held by most British commentators to be irresistible.

But they have been resisted. Not totally, but far more successfully than most British economists or politicians will allow. Partly, one suspects, because the most effective opposition to this wave of history has been mounted by the French resistance.

Even though the employment rate, calculated as a percentage of the working-age population in jobs, is a little less impressive in France compared with the UK, the French still have a significantly lower percentage of workless households. That is not a statistical quirk. It is a consequence of deliberate policy and cultural assertion. The French have, like the original indomitable Gaul, Asterix, defied forces others thought overwhelming by recourse to a potent elixir of masculinity and patriotism. They have, to be blunt, drawn strength from their chauvinisme.

The French have deliberately sought to protect the social, cultural and economic position of the paterfamilias. Traditional French industries. from Dassault through Renault to Thomson. Elf and countless others, have enjoyed support in the past, through economic bad times, from an indulgent, paternalist state. French agriculture, and high culture, have been sheltered from the chillest winds, reinforcing a sense of collective national endeavour and protecting the position of the sturdy Gallic archetypes who populate both fields. Both Jean de Florette and Gerard Depardieu have been cherished. French society has, in short, been configured to support the baguette-winner.

But surely only at great cost. the AngloSaxon would say. Has not France been economically crippled by having to bear the burden of the comfortably-padded paterfamilias? While Britain has benefited from ridding itself of such absurd methods of preserving male employment as the dirigiste Dock Labour Scheme, is not France holding itself back by supporting its peasantry through its own dirigiste Languedoc labour scheme?

Well, not according to the OECD. In its last economic outlook the world's most authoritative auditor of economic performance declared that France was showing 'robust economic growth and low inflation. Job creation was vigorous'. And, perhaps more significantly for the long-term health of the French nation, the support shown to the paterfamilias brings significant social benefits. France enjoys greater family stability. and thus lower bills for social disruption, than the UK.

According to Eurostat, the statistical office of the European Commission, Britain has overtaken France in the level of marital break-ups. In 1960, when British industry was still mollycoddled, the per capita divorce rate in the United Kingdom was lower than France's. Now it is 35 per cent higher. In 1998, the last year for which figures are available, 115.600 French couples divorced, compared with 160,100 British.

These trends do not exist in isolation from the wider social environment. In France, the protected position of the middle-aged, semi-skilled male worker makes him an attractive partner, worth retaining. He is more likely to have a steady income with which to provide for the raising of a family, and he is more likely to be engaged in the type of labour that maintains his dignity and prestige in the eyes of others. He is, to be blunt, less likely than his British counterpart to be employed flipping hamburgers, wearing a security guard's uniform or changing nappies.

It is a fact of human nature that male attractiveness is generally linked to the man's capacity to provide and the maintenance of his sense of self-worth. The feckless or jobless male makes an unproductive, and unattractive, partner. The male compelled to work in a field which compromises his masculinity, in his own eyes and those of his peers, feels, and is, less of a catch for any woman. These are harsh truths. and one might wish we lived in a gentler world. But the effect of men robbed of their masculinity shows up in these divorce statistics.

As it does in the number of young women choosing to marry in the first place. The increasing number of children growing up outside wedlock, the number of what the ethical socialist Norman Dennis has called 'families without fathers', has risen exponentially in Britain in the last twenty years. Yet, as both Peter Lilley and Michael Portillo have noted in the past, that trend is not replicated at anything like the same rate on the Continent. The proportion of live births outside wedlock in the EU as a whole, in 1998, was 26 per cent, but in the UK it was 37.6 per cent.

Might there not be a link between the more attractive figure cut by the continental paterfamilias as a provider and nurturer, compared with his British counterpart, and the proportion of children born into married families?

It would be quite wrong, of course, to stigmatise children born out of wedlock. I speak as one myself. But it is an uncomfortable economic fact that children born outside conventional family structures tend to place a greater strain on the state in due course. Their levels of academic and economic achievement are lower. Their propensity to commit crime is higher. It may well be the case that a society decides that those are prices worth paying for a more permissive sexual climate. But it is undeniable, on past evidence, that an economic price has to be paid. And it is yet another price which is much lower on the Continent.

It is the French desire to nurture and support the traditional male breadwinner which makes that nation suspicious of Tony Blair's insistence on 'change' and 'economic reform'. And understandably so. Their desire to preserve both their national champion industries, and the privileged position of the paterfamilias, their very special chauvinisme, has worked for them. Not only has France continued to enjoy enviable economic growth; it has also insulated itself more successfully than Britain from the 'costs of social failure' about which Mr Blair is so concerned.

Just, however, as France is a product of its history, so are we of ours. Britain has chosen a different path, which has brought with it contrasting costs and benefits. Having grown up as an Anglo-Saxon economic liberal I would not suggest that we should try to transplant Gallic social and economic habits here, anymore than I would argue that Pinot Noir should be grown on the banks of the Tyne.

All I would argue is that we learn a little humility when it comes to lecturing our neighbours. One size does not fit all, one economic model is not applicable in every circumstance. The truest Europeans are not those, like Mr Blair, who see a difference and pronounce it a heresy. The truest Europeans are those who stand in the way of homogenisation, and recognise the validity of the old chauviniste apercu — 'Nye la difference'.

Michael Gave is assistant editor of the Times