The result of the British election left many French people perplexe. President Chirac told them on television that, "In Britain there are methods and social rules which would be neither accepted nor acceptable here." In France, according to Le Monde, the word "blairisme" is an insult. Indeed, all through the campaign for the referendum on the European constitution, both "yes" and "no" camps, left and right, have been united on one thing: the direction to avoid at all costs is that taken by Blair in Britain. That vow was noisily reaffirmed the day after his election victory. No amount of money spent papering over the cracks, claims Le Figaro, "will ever bridge the gaping class divide in Britain—only a complete reworking of the entire education system will transform the oldest class-ridden society in Europe." Agreeing with a Frenchman who has taught in Britain for ten years that Britain is a two-speed, racist society with a "catastrophic" education system, the London correspondent of Radio France said, "Very true: looking at British society through French eyes, it's undeniably a very elitist, non-egalitarian society. Three million children live in poverty." This shocks listeners in France (where there are only 1m such children), reinforcing their conviction that the third way leads to hell. So they are very confused when they start to hear that the British economy is fizzing, the standard of living has overtaken the French and unemployment has dropped to 4.8 per cent. People simply cannot understand—it goes counter to everything they have read in the press.
There is in the French press what Alain Frachon, senior editor on Le Monde's weekend magazine, calls "la pensée unique, dominante." It comes, Frachon believes, partly from the historical role of the state, partly from a certain ideological blindness on the left, which he feels is still anchored in the pre-market-economy era where most French journalists and editors have their roots. They are haunted by the fear that if they don't actively denigrate free market opinions they will be branded "anti-progressive," and in France this is to be cast into outer darkness. This consensus or conformity makes for a uniformity of information. In the first ten days of the referendum campaign, CSA, the media watchdog, found the "no" camp had been allowed half the airtime of the "yes."
But very recently, almost overnight, what Fachon calls a "voodoo incantation" demonising free market Britain has changed the campaign's tone. On 28th April the weekly Nouvel Observateur carried a six-page spread entitled "Why are the English better than us?" The same day, two monthly economic magazines, Challenges and Capital, ran similar stories. All three magazines praised the same things (the City, good job centres, modernisation of the health service) and criticised the same things (poor children, families crippled by debt, transport). The same week the Catholic La Croix devoted three pages to "Tony the discreet Christian" and Le Monde ran a major double portrait of Brown and Blair. Traditionally, Le Monde's London posting went to the staffer displaying the most acute symptoms of Anglophobia, but now Jean-Pierre Langellier not only sings the praises of the Brown/Blair economy—he even uses Le Monde's chat forums to tell his compatriots their preconceptions are ill-informed: "Daily reality in Britain," he writes, "has nothing to do with this simplistic, demonising vision." And again: "Contrary to the received idea, Blairism has nothing to do with Thatcherism." He even defends those practices his president says a Frenchman could not accept. "Not true," he says when a reader carps that reducing unemployment in Britain has only been in short contracts, part-time work or jobs the French term précaire—for the French do not consider a job un job unless it comes complete with safety net, guaranteed for life with a generous pension.
But his most iconoclastic remarks are restricted to his chat forum, for, as both Langellier and his editor hinted to me, until the 29th May referendum there is a limit to what the French press dares publish about Britain in Europe. Most journalists and editors want the "yes" to win, and for that to happen it is crucial that the French voter's preconceived vision of Europe remain undisturbed: France at the head, Britain the free market bogeyman on the periphery. They admit this is a myth, but when their readers glimpsed the reality of the EU's pro-market Bolkestein directive, it briefly provoked a chaos of strikes and a soaring of the "no" vote. Chastened, the French press now dares only to repeat Chirac's creaking mantra that France, la crème, is omnipotent in Europe, that it has only to glare and Brussels bows, whether bailing out French industry or diminishing VAT on restaurant meals. Every journalist and editor knows that 15 of the 25 EU members are closer to Britain's liberal views, that British thinking dominates in Brussels. They know that deregulation will continue, the flood of Chinese textiles won't stop, that Brussels is manoeuvring to grub up hundreds of hectares of French vines. But the French public must not know: the cream must not be curdled.
