Chez moi, le deluge!

I paraphrase de Gaulle (I think it was?) as I watch the rain continue to fall and the level of the water in the moat rise alarmingly here at Marshside Acres. Yes it is now officially the wettest drought on record.  With more rain forecast for the next few days, we're saved from worrying about the grass and the veg although unfortunately, the weather does not reduce the volume of bird defecation. The gun remains high on the shopping list.

My main reason for lapsing into French was not for the sake of  a witty and topical pun (well I liked it) but as a nod to the elections currently underway across the channel. El Presidente is in a spot of bother it seems and is now reduced to courting the national front vote. No doubt he'll be promising further repatriations of those less than 100% francais, which sounds risky as that probably includes him. I've not been following all this too carefully but I gather his main rival is promising "growth" as opposed to Sarkozy's "austerity". If only life were si facile.

What can we learn from the French? The thing is that they are amazingly successful when you consider that they work short hours, have long lunches and even longer holidays and as a result have markedly uncompetitive labour costs. Like the Chinese, they don't seem to believe in markets but unlike the Chinese, they can't produce every possible consumer item at a world-beating price. They produce some decent wine and cheese but surely that's not enough?

Relying almost completely on nuclear power stations is a clever move, allowing them to laugh in the face of rising oil prices. So there's one lesson for us, as we plunge ourselves into poverty in order to pay for more bloody windmills. But here's another thing: they have a ruling class with a shared and focused mind-set.

The French booted out their aristocracy in a rather violent way some years back but since then have replaced them with something similar albeit without the titles and the laissez manger cake attitude. They have universities geared up to churn out a ruling class in the shape of politicians and civil servants. We used to have a ruling class who learnt on the job, i.e. on the family estate and it seemed to work pretty well, if building the world's biggest empire, making all the world's cotton fabric, controlling most of the world's shipping, etc., etc., is anything to go by. (I hear mutterings of "what about the workers!" but even Karl Marx was impressed: living in London he marvelled that in Britain, in the mid-19th century, you could buy five hundred kinds of hammer!)

Like the British aristocracy of yore, the French ruling class have the inner certainty that they were born to run the country and by and large, the rest of the population seems happy to go along with this. This is maybe because they trust the elite always to do what's best for France. While most of us float around in a kind of democratic vacuum, our futures decided by unelected wasters in the EU, the European Court of Human Rights, the European Central Bank, etc., the French make these extra-national institutions work for them (the Common Agricultural Policy) or just ignore them (the repatriation of gypsies).

We seem to have entered an age of "sham democracy". The Chinese and the Russians are making hay out of this but big questions are being asked in Europe as people find out that perhaps democracy isn't all it's cracked up to be (just ask the Greeks and the Irish) and what really counts is good government, not democratically elected government. In a funny sort of way, even the protesters at St Paul's and Wall Street were saying the same thing, as I've pointed out before. But how to you ensure good government without (or more to the point, even with) elections? Perhaps the French can show us the way.

With reform of the House of Lords on the agenda, now's the chance to re-empower our own aristocracy, not to mention the monarchy. Chic alors! Or as we say here, unleash the hounds...