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Raise Taxes Or The Kid Gets It
EURSOC is used to Europhiles firing off chilling warnings about the dangers of not integrating more closely with the EU, but this one takes the biscuit:
"...if British politicians persist with US-style taxation and refuse to embrace Europe as the future of Britain,news of children killing each other will continue to bombard us. It is nothing less than a choice of civilisation."
It's British-based French writer Agnès Poirier, usually found setting herself up as the target of abuse on the Guardian's Comment Is Free pages, but today she's to be found in the Independent, one of those strange websites that doesn't let readers have a go at its wittering columnists.
Mme Poirier's schtick is that France is better than Britain; more specifically, that the France of her childhood is better than the Britain of today. She is far from being the only person in Britain (or, for that matter, France) to believe that the blue-remembered hills of their infancy held more promise and pleasure than the grim reality of the present. However, as France broods on its economic decline while Britain flashes the bling of its new wealth, she performs a useful reminder that not everything that glisters in Blair's Britain is gold - and not every French citizen is convinced that the scales are weighed heavily in the UK's favour.
For one so convinced of the evils of the market, it's a canny self-marketing strategy and it seems to give her a living. Of course, Mme Poirier isn't like the other 299,999 French citizens who could find work only in London. The others, she writes, "Can be found working where solidarity and humanity are dirty words: the City."
Well, that's one way to look at immigration: Leave your country to make a better living and you become something less than human? Unless, of course, you leave to lecture your new home on its faults.
She refers to the discredited UNICEF report on the plight of Britain's children. The report placed Britain at the bottom of the pile for children's welfare. But on her own logic, France doesn't do much better: This land of milk and honey comes sixth from bottom.
She notes the horror - national and international - which greeted the deaths of several teenagers in gang warfare shootings in South London this month. PM Tony Blair vowed to tackle gun crime; Opposition leader David Cameron spoke of Britain teetering at the edge of a precipice.
But Britain isn't the only nation where youngsters kill and are killed: Furthermore, one could argue that the reaction of the UK's press and politicians suggested that gang killings are being taken seriously.
Contrast this with France, in 2005. Shortly after a boy was killed in crossfire between two drug-dealing gangs, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy visited the troubled estate and vowed to clean up the gangs with a "karcher" - a power hose.
The youngster's death was suddenly forgotten: What gripped France for the following weeks was debate in parliament, in the papers, in the news channels and in the streets over M Sarkozy's choice of words. Never mind that murderous thugs seemed intent on turning the housing estates around Paris into war zones: The Interior Minister was using language that might hurt their feelings.
