France, a country that does things differently, is worth paying attention to contretemps
Richard Calland
It’s 2.10pm September 11. The TGV Paris-Bordeaux Express leaves the Gare de Montparnesse on time. No surprise there. Nor that the carriage is so clean; the engine so smooth and quiet; and its motion so rapid. You can, I believe, get a meaningful measure of a society by the demeanour of its railways.
Thus, the rail-tracks of Cape Town continue to faithfully record the demographic and socio-economic fault lines that scar its society. And, while Swiss trains may still run on time, the British rail network is in chaos, fatally contaminated by a privatisation of manifestly massive misconception: a national railway system privatised into tiny shreds of incoherence.
A week later, in London, I am informed by a representative of a company called Western and Great Northern Railways that the one train I intended to catch during my short stay in the United Kingdom had been cancelled because there were “not enough trained drivers”.
Now you don’t need an MBA to work out that to run a railway you need a certain number of qualified train drivers, a simple fact that is evidently beyond the grasp and capability of this particular corporation.
Indeed it is this sort of incompetence that has convinced my former (Labour) MP that, if there was to be a referendum tomorrow, the British public would readily vote for the restoration of the (far from perfect) publicly owned British Rail.
Yet, the accusation against Prime Minister Tony Blair from the left is that he is mesmerised by the private sector, persisting in policies of privatisation and semi-privatisation through public-private partnerships and public finance initiatives, as if the private sector provides a panacea.
That day The Guardian contained an exclusive interview with Blair in which he warns “private firms who take over the management of Britain’s schools, hospitals and transport should not try to achieve increased efficiency or profits at the expense of the pay and conditions of public sector employees”.
This can’t be naivete: Blair is intelligent enough to know that companies have statutory duties to maximise profits for their shareholders. It goes to the heart of what, in the year 2001, is about as near as you will get to an ideological contest and one that has resonance throughout much of the world, including, of course, South Africa.
Now, whether bringing in private sector “skills” amounts to privatisation or not is largely a game of semantics. For the French, however, there is a fundamental issue of principle involved, namely, the commitment to public service, a public service run by the state on behalf of the people. During the five days of a colloquium on democracy and governance that I have just attended, I ask the same question of different French governance professors and practitioners and get the same answer. L Rpublic is at the heart of the nation-state; the French fundamentally believe in the state; and so a strong state-owned public service has always been non-negotiable.
President Jacques Chirac consistently defends public service expenditure; indeed, if there is to be any tilt towards privatisation of public services, it will come from socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin and not the conservative Chirac when they contest next year’s presidential campaign.
In other words, the French offer an alternative approach that is as typical in its sense of exceptionalism as it is deserving of attention. Their railways and Metro speak for themselves; but they also have spare capacity in their hospital system and have invested heavily in schools in low-income areas; all in contrast to much of the rest of Europe and beyond.
French exceptionalism in the sphere of public service is part not just of their general preference for carving their own route through history, but of their current sceptical view of contemporary global macroeconomic heterodoxies. For example, the French government has introduced a 35-hour working week. According to the Anglo-Saxon hegemony, this represents an outrageous, job-destroying affront to the sanctity of labour market flexibility. Yet, since its introduction, aimed at spreading work around more equitably, half a million jobs have been created.
This is just one of the issues that frame what the UK-based Industrial Society tags as “Another Country: France versus the Anglo-Saxon Economists”. It’s worth a look (www.indsoc.co.uk); unless you come from one of the Francophone African countries there is a somewhat indolent tendency among all of us to see only the English language comparators which reinforces the hegemony of the Anglo-Saxon Economists. One feature of globalisation is that profound challenges to governance are shared by the North and the South, despite the obvious starkness of the contextual differences.
That is why it is useful to pay some attention to a G7 country, France, which does things rather differently.
As Will Hutton, the author of one of the most influential books of the early nineties, The State We’re In, argues, “the dreary laws of Gradgrind economics that we accept as axiomatic in Britain are disproved daily by our old rival … Vive the social contract. Vive high public spending. Vive l France.”
As I read the Guardian interview from the comfort of my TGV seat, across the English Channel in Brighton Blair is making the final touches to what was to be the most important speech of his second premiership so far. Apparently, he is unusually tense.
The previous day his minister of trade and industry was met with a reception of stony silence from the Trade Union Council conference. Blair wants to be firm but also to try and prick the growing mythology around his supposed obsession with the private sector’s involvement in public services.
But a repeat from the erstwhile founding partners of Labour is not an attractive prospect. As the prime minister’s Jag arrives at the Brighton conference centre a commercial aeroplane flies into the World Trade Centre in New York. Blair informs his audience of the news and that he must return immediately to London and is rewarded, for some reason, with a standing ovation. Copies of his speech are handed out. If it were not so distasteful a notion, one could say he was saved by the bell.
While other events mean that we are now more concerned with the potential for French exceptionalism in the conduct of their international relations, the question of the relationship between business and public services, between left-of-centre governments and trade union movements, will continue to nag, in Britain, in South Africa, and elsewhere. It simply won’t go away, and nor should it.
Richard Calland was the guest of the Centre National De La Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in France, as part of an ongoing collaboration between the CNRS and its sister equivalent in South Africa, the Human Sciences Research Council