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Keep right on, Prime Minister.

Regards, Ivan

Ping!

France needs to reform 1st

Hmm... but it will reform AND crumble anyway - why "or"?

40 per cent of its budget into agriculture where only 2 per cent of its people were employed

I read last night here on FR that the EU CAP is at 640 *BILLION* euros??? I hope that's an error.

Jeez! Thats almost a trillion bucks! With France getting the bulk of it.

It should be more than Britan complaining about this.

Right on, Mr. P.M. And this business about "old Europe", did you get that notion from Donald Rumsfeld? Well, it just goes to show that Rumsfeld was right all along.

It's dead, Ivan.

ROTFL, I know you're smiling when you get to post articles like this one Ivan.

FReegards
Baredog

M. Blair has touched directly on THE core issue of the EU as it exists: the PAC IS the European budget.

The TVA goes to Europe, and Europe spends it primarily on the PAC.

This was a cosy arrangement for a long time, but now that the EU has frayed on political unity, M. Blair has found the issue that can transform the union.

It is true: France gets more from the PAC than anyone else. And it was designed this way. Given that, it was always possible to ignore the British rebate.

But M. Blair wishes to put the PAC into play, and the Swedes and Hollandais apparently agree! One can envision other countries that may well want to bring this issue to a head. The East, for example, would benefit from the PAC, but in nothing like the proportions that France does.
This is all on the table now.

Schroeder's government is apparently mortally wounded, but we can expect nothing but resistance until he is gone.

And in France?
Reforming the PAC will be impossible! It will provoke a general strike of farmers.

If the British desire to quite literally upend Europe and provoke a literal French revolution, a new 1968, getting Europe rolling in the direction of dismantling the PAC will do it. The French agricultural sector is massively subventionne, and while massively productive, it is a productivity that is often absurd. Witness the destruction of fine Bordeaux and Burgogne this year, or their conversion into alcohol for motorcars!

The market cannot function here, because the state so completely dominates the field.

Of course, this is also true of American agriculture and the massive subsidies.

M. Blair has a real opportunity here to change everything.
Ireland, Sweden, Finland, Holland, perhaps Denmark, Austria and Poland - these might all join in the clamor to change the PAC.

France will veto, but once the issue begins to roll, once the rest of Europe really opens its eyes to the dull, boring staid fact of the French agricultural subsidy, the pressure for reform will become quite intense.

Blair has found the pressure point, the weak link in the whole European chain. He was pushed into it by a characteristic Chirac gaffe of demanding that Britain surrender the rebate.

This caused M. Blair to parry and riposte directly on an economic line...a line that has been unmentioned, untested, indeed sacred throughout the whole history of Europe.

What could emerge from this is fascinating, because France, like Russia, is at heart an agricultural nation. Were France to be forced by the collapse of the PAC to change to a market economy in the agricultural sector thanks to the loss of subventions, it would radicalize France economically.

Everything would change.
First would be the resistance, with the general strike and the farmers blocking roads. This never fails against the French government, but this time, the governments withholding the money and desired policy will be foreign, beyond the grasp of Paris.
The government will fall, but no government can resist the tide.
And there is not the money in France to maintain the PAC on French finances.
And so the French agricultural sector, the only sector in which there are millions of individuals with fonds de commerce, would be forced to change. Unemployment will be terrible. Social unrest, difficult.

But the paradox will be that the most staid and traditional of all sectors will be forced to become agile, to consolidate, to CHANGE, and to become competitive to European norms (which will still resist American Frankestein foods and chemically treated meats).

And then it will be the farm sector that has actually reformed into a modern economy. And that will drag along the rest of France with surprising speed, because of the distribution of deputies across the provinces and the concentration of rural power in the Parliament that all of these seats gives.

One could never have guessed that it would happen this way, but if M. Blair remains firm, he will do the greatest service that can possibly be imagined for France.