Blog

This week’s blog is on the French Elections and comes to you from Prof. Robert Tombs, Professor of French History at Cambridge and a Fellow of St John’s College.

In the aftermath of Thursday's elections, Politeia Director Sheila Lawlor argues that local government is the loser.

As the council election results sink in, there’s no doubt about the thumbs down to the ruling parties, Conservative and Liberal Democrat. Although all the votes aren’t yet counted, the picture is of a fall in vote share in England, with the Conservatives at 31 per cent (36 per cent nationally in the 2010 general election); and the Liberal Democrats at 16 per cent (23 per cent nationally in 2010).  Labour by contrast has gained significantly and leads with a 38 per cent share (29 per cent nationally in 2010).

However, if I were Ed Milliband, Labour’s leader, I’d be wary of any premature sense of triumph or of suggesting ‘my’ policies were better  than ‘theirs’.  It’s not clear that voters are ‘against’ the cuts for the country or would wish to return to the destructive spending spree of Labour’s deficit and debt years, though they may share (as do many Conservatives) worry at the changes in the tax system to the detriment of charities, pensioners and many hard-pressed parents. And though Labour's alternatives may not be so attractive, the party can capitalise on the sense that the ruling classes have no idea how much difference a few hundred pounds a year makes to most people who face pay cuts or job losses or how the tax on a hot pasty is more than a symbol to the millions for whom that has become the new fish and chips.

In fact it's not so much the policies that are the problem, but the absence of a clear lead irrespective of what the focus groups say.

By Robert Tombs, Professor of French History at Cambridge University. Politeia has just published Prof Tombs' Lessons from History pamphlet.

The result of the first round of the French elections shows alarming oddities in French politics today. Despite the huge issues faced by France, personality has counted: M. Sarkozy is not liked. 

He was elected despite this to do something decisive – be ‘the French Thatcher’.  He has not been. This has allowed attention to focus less on what he has done, than on what he is. He is generally regarded as not having the dignity required of a leader of France.

Many young voters supported candidates of the extreme right and left, who reject the politicians of Paris and Brussels, and the world economic system. To call this populism for once seems justified: ‘stop the world, I want to get off’. The leading candidate is populist too: France has been postponing difficult decisions for a perilously long time, and M. Hollande’s message is to postpone them some more. 

Is fiscal stimulus the answer to our economic woes? Or would it make things worse?  Here Vito Tanzi gives a flavour of his forthcoming Politeia publication for our series Recession or Recovery?

There has been a great debate in western economies: is the best solution to the present economic problems a Keynesian stimulus so that public funds are used to stimulate employment and investment?

While some of the world's  influential economists  like  Krugman advocate such Keynesian stimulus as a tool for recovery, the case is not self evident for economies who look to stimulus when their fiscal balances are poor or unsustainable, as so many today are. Indeed deficits at times reach double figures (the Eurozone's is around 6 per cent and Germany's is around 4 percent). National debts often exceed 80 percent of GDP in the Eurozone and UK economies. Stimulus interventions would simply increase those deficits and debts, making it far harder for the worst-off countries to borrow money at affordable interest rates, so increasing even further the deficits. It is highly questionable whether they would do much for economic recovery.

Michael Gove has commented that universities should dictate the content of A levels:  the system as it stands fails to  prepare students adequately for university. Here, historian David Abulafia, who will contribute to Politeia's history curriculum, welcomes the idea. But, he warns, freedom and aspiration will be the key to success. This means the officials, whether in the universities themselves or at the Department of Business, should stand aside.

Top universities will surely welcome the idea that their own academics should play a key role in determining the A-level syllabus. After all, one of the purposes of A-levels, though I admit not the only one, is to set people up for life at university. Nowadays sixth-forms like to tell their students that they will treat them like adults, exempting them from uniform and allowing them plenty of extra freedom. But the most important thing has been missing: freedom to think creatively while they are following their A-level courses, which have made demands increasingly remote from real critical learning.