Can Sarko halt France’s decline?

When I first moved to Britain in 1995, after a misspent youth in France, there were few Gallic accents to be heard outside the tourist hotspots. The long-established community in South Kensington had been joined by a growing number of French students at institutions such as the London School of Economics, but that was about it. 

These days the French are everywhere. Tens of thousands of entrepreneurial, ambitious young graduates have moved to London and the south-east of England, fleeing sky-high levels of youth unemployment and a society obsessed with the preservation of the status quo. It’s not just that the 35-hour working week combined with huge social security costs means that it makes little sense for companies to give young, inexperienced workers a try. Equally destructive is France’s crippling burden of tax and public spending, which has squeezed out the private sector and destroyed incentives to work, invest or set up new businesses.