Liberté, égalité, fraternité

[Felicity, I guess so]

I know it was a few pages back now, but I don't see any difference between Italian in S. East and Vlaams in the N. West, but the latter is included on the map.

[ursus arctos]

I don't necessarily agree, but I would imagine that they would say that French Flanders has always been a thing, while Franco-Italie really isn't (Nizza is a bit different, and the local dialect isn't standard Italian).

[Diable Rouge]

I don't necessarily agree, but I would imagine that they would say that French Flanders has always been a thing, while Franco-Italie really isn't (Nizza is a bit different, and the local dialect isn't standard Italian).

A variant of Occitan, I believe, as the Monegasque dialect has been described.

[Pérou Flaquettes]

I know it was a few pages back now, but I don't see any difference between Italian in S. East and Vlaams in the N. West, but the latter is included on the map.

That’s two different things. The variety of Flemish (West Flemish) they speak in French Flanders is also spoken across the border in Flemish Belgium, at least in the Western part of Belgian Flanders ("West Flemish is spoken by about a million people in the Belgian province of West Flanders, and a further 120,000 in the neighbouring Dutch coastal district of Zeelandic Flanders and 10,000 in the northern part of the French département of Nord"). Just take a shufti at these 2 wikis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Flemish and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Flemish

(or: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamand_oriental + https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flamand_occidental)

The difference with the Italian situation here is that there’s no Italian spoken as a dialect in South East France, just plenty of fluent speakers of Italian, which isn’t what the LIMSI researchers have sought to record and inventory on that speaking atlas. SE people have their own Provençal dialects and a variety of Occitan dialects too (very few speak them but that’s another matter altogether, the overall number of dialect speakers are dwindling as we’ve seen, the demographics are unfavourable so the stocks are not being replenished fast enough so to speak).

[Pérou Flaquettes]

Fee paying schools are much more common in Dublin than Scotland (where I think only 3 in my day, maybe now 5% of the population are private schooled) Kev, but not all are like private schools the UK sense.

These private schools exist everywhere in the world probably but only the UK in the West seems to have this highly segregated educational system with 2,500 schools at 10K a pop/yr minimum, which is of course made far worse post-18 with the high university tuition fees, so double whammy there.

It really is hugely damaging for social mobility, whatever various UK gvts like to spout about "meritocracy".

Social mobility is notoriously hard to measure but one telling angle is to look at where those with the "best/top jobs" were educated. If we take those jobs as meaning professional jobs (medicine, civil service, dentistry, banking, law etc.), the findings of various studies in the last decade are damning.

Below is just a snapshot (new figures in forthcoming years bound to be worse because of university, let’s not forget it’s not just the huge fees – payable post degree – but accommodation & associated costs, over £150 a week in many cities, even in "cheap" places like Newcastle, new-ish uni accommodation in town is min. £130 a week/room – cheaper in shared accommodation, multi-occupancy houses in the studenty areas). I’ve known many 15-18 years olds who basically had to give up ambitions of going to uni because of the huge overall cost, especially if second or third child in family, parents just can’t finance their studies after paying for their brother/sister.

The Independent, Feb. 2016: Privately educated people dominate top British jobs, damning report finds. Their grip on power is most noticeable in the judiciary

[…] In medicine, 61 per cent of doctors were privately educated while 22 per cent went to selective state grammar schools and just 16 per cent to comprehensives. The list goes on – 48 per cent of civil servants were educated privately, 29 per cent went to selective grammar schools and 23 per cent to comprehensives.

Only 16% of doctors went to comprehensives. 16 fucking % ffs. Only 23% of civil servants were comp-educated, etc.


(BBC): Privately educated 'still dominate professions'

The research found that three-quarters (74%) of the UK's top judges went to a fee-paying school, and nearly eight in 10 (78%) went on to Oxford or Cambridge University.

Among top military personnel, some seven in 10 (71%) were educated in the private sector, although just 14% were Oxbridge educated.

Slightly more than half of leading print journalists and solicitors (51% each) attended fee-paying schools.

Just over half (54%) of these journalists attended Oxford or Cambridge, along with 55% of solicitors and 51% of the senior civil servants included in the study.

This bit (from the Guardian, 2011) is significant too (to show that it’s not just about money):

"Schools in the independent sector have the good fortune to be free of government interference and are thus able to choose the best curriculum for their pupils, concentrating on education rather than targets. Our schools are able to guide pupils towards the subjects that will benefit them, rather than the subjects that will help the school rise up a league table."

[Wouter D]

Westvlaams is fucked up.

As you were.

[Fussbudget]

The Independent, Feb. 2016: Privately educated people dominate top British jobs, damning report finds. Their grip on power is most noticeable in the judiciary
[…] In medicine, 61 per cent of doctors were privately educated while 22 per cent went to selective state grammar schools and just 16 per cent to comprehensives. The list goes on – 48 per cent of civil servants were educated privately, 29 per cent went to selective grammar schools and 23 per cent to comprehensives.

Absolutely no way those civil service stats are correct. I'm assuming they mean senior civil service which is a whole different beast.

[Pérou Flaquettes]

Well spotted Fussbudget-œil de lynx à qui walou n'échappe et à qui on la lui fait pas à elle.

I’ve just checked the source of the Independent article (the Sutton Trust, full study here) and you’re right of course, it’s senior civil servants that the Indie is on about, they should have made it clear (and not left out "senior") and I should have realised, but I’m not too clued up on the finer nuances of the civil service and was probably a bit slow last night. From page 2 of the Sutton Trust pdf: "In the senior civil service, about half (48%) attended private school, nearly a third a grammar school (29%) and the remainder comprehensives (23%). At university, about half had attended Oxbridge (51%), over a third UK top thirty institutions (38%) and a small minority other UK universities (7%)."

It should also be "top doctors" in the Independent excerpt and not just "doctors": "In medicine, nearly two thirds (61%) of top doctors were educated at independent schools, nearly one quarter at grammar schools (22%) and the remainder (16%) comprehensives." (it's explained page 19 of the Sutton Trust report what is meant exactly by "top").

Still, it should not detract from the fact that only 23% of senior civil servants were educated in comprehensives, which is dreadfully low, ditto the other data. These figures really paint a damning picture of our highly segregated education system.

I don’t know, maybe I subconsciously over-interpreted some of the Indie data last night. I come from a solid working-class background (sadly, people who forgot their roots as they became much more comfortable in the 1970s-2010s, some of them ridiculously so, chiefly thanks to property, both in terms of investments and inflation on main residences) and have taught mainly working-class/lower middle-class kids most of my career, so it’s close to my heart and I am generally repulsed by the way things are going in this country re education and particularly this growing educational divide, a chasm more like. I don’t teach anymore, I work part-time but not as a teacher, I miss teaching for many reasons but with those Tory vandals in charge teaching = sky-high stress levels + low job satisfaction + poor atmosphere at work + zero work-life balance + the pain inflicted by seeing at such close hand a thoroughly unfair system actively damaging the life chances of the very kids in your care. And when you hit 50 in a very stressful job and you’re financially sorted, you suddenly hugely value your health and sanity! Oh well, every cloud has a silver lining as they say and with the Tories fucking things up in education and in general it’s made us (my wife and I) re-assess a lot of things in life, so from a personal viewpoint it’s been beneficial in the end.

It’s not just the Tories, New Labour did a lot of damage too but the Tories really are something else. I’m not against UK-style private schools at all (I even worked in one and applied to two indie jobs thereafter – after a while, whatever your ideals, you just become so sick of working in shit conditions and all the rest of it), but I mightily resent the way the state school system is gradually left behind and behind and behind. Nobody expects a level playing field in education but what’s happening is sickening (huge budget cuts in real terms = 90% of schools in the red, poor resources, larger classes etc.).

[Pérou Flaquettes]

"Civil servant/service" is an interesting phrase though. It’s a tricky one to understand precisely for lay people or outsiders like myself, it’s not always clear what the media exactly mean by civil servants the way they use it, I’m not sure they even know themselves. The way it’s used in the media today is often vague or confusing, and from a translation viewpoint it’s a pitfall/headache for E>F translators. They usually go for "fonctionnaire" but of course it’s unsatisfactory (~public sector employee), it’s very culture-specific. A bit like the term "engineer", it’s often a bit fuzzy and you have to work out the exact meaning contextually, not always easy (engineer vs chartered engineer is one way to differentiate of course but it's still too vague in people's minds).

Come to think of it, the term "professional" (used in that Independent article and Sutton Trust report) is also getting awfully vague. People generally put the teaching profession in that category but many teachers certainly do not see themselves as professionals anymore after the total de-professionalisation and hollowing out of the status from the mid-2000s onwards but particularly since the Tories took over (Academisation/MATs), "total dismantling of the profession" it should have been officially called.

Yes, you have Senior teachers on £80K + a year in large-ish academies or MATs (a bit of a misnomer as they hardly teach but never mind) but you also have other Senior teachers on 40-50K a year in smaller set-ups, so basically what I was on for most of my career as a Head of Dpt, as they are not on the Leadership pay scale (or whatever other scales they use in that academy if indeed it’s an academy) but have the same Terms & Conditions as an ordinary classroom teacher (meaning: on top of the teaching workload, they’ve been lumbered with all the shit Senior teachers have to deal with but without the matching salary). And then you have many teachers in academies who will be stuck on £20-22K a year for ~70hrs a week for years, so the latter really struggle to consider themselves as professionals as they are effectively on the minimum wage. It’s a very mixed bag but they all fall in the "professional" category for the general public, many of whom believe that if you’re a "good" (Ofsted good) teacher, you’ll be on 50-60K, "as seen on TV"… (the fucking DfE ads).

A few months ago I got talking to a 30 y-old solicitor, a fellow Sunderland fan, about this (more uplifting than talking about the Black Cats) and he also rejected that "professional" tag for lawyers/solicitors like himself, who are simply employees on an average wage. He is an in-house lawyer in the legal/commercial dpt of a big insurance company but is only on £27K a year after 4 years. It can go up substantially of course as you progress through the ranks, £80K+ if you get to Senior or Partner position, but he was saying that in his particular field it could be a very long slog (~20 yrs) to even get to £40K a year as the market was awash with litigation solicitors or whatever his exact branch/title is. He told me about young legal aid lawyers too, I know it wasn’t great as some of the pupils I’ve taught have gone into law etc. but it’s worse than I thought, they get a very rough deal apparently (with the bonus now of being saddled with debts), as illustrated here: More than half of young legal aid lawyers earn less than £25,000, according to YLAL
. Not quite the vision the general public has of that profession then.

[Lang Spoon]

Fucking hell Britain never fails to surprise in its shiteyness. Really don’t understand why young teachers from Ireland would go to England (at least since they started hiring post crash again). The shitty pay scale for new entrants here is way better than teh Brit equivalent.

Kind of glad I never did my solicitors exams now.

[sw2borshch]

Well, I'm a civil servant and a 'professional', in that internally I'm classed as a tax professional, even though I see that as a bit of a joke. I'm what used to be classed as a HM Inspector of Taxes, even though we don't use that title anymore. Yer man on the Redcar omnibus would probably class that as a professional, but would have little idea of how the levels of training have been degraded over the past five years or so (I've been an inspector for just over a year and know that my peers who did the inspector training in an earlier era were much more thoroughly, and testingly, trained than I have been) and levels of pay over the past eight years or so. I'm paid a touch under £30k, there's thousands and thousands in the department on less than me who are tax (and other disciplines too) professionals also. Depending on when joined/were trained, they possibly have had something approaching professional training, mind, like I had for the tax role I used to work in.
Mind you, most of the people who had proper training have left or will be over the next couple of years.

[Rogin the Armchair fan]

Do they still give you the briefcase with the crown symbol on it? I've got one of those knocking about somewhere (and I was never even an HMIT, I just liberated an old one out of a cupboard).

[sw2borshch]

Do they bollocks.

By rights, you should send me that one, Rogin.

[sw2borshch]

Are you in the Hofbraeuhaus in Munich in that photie?

[Lang Spoon]

The worst error outside foreign policy made by the Attlee govt was not hobbling the private schools. Apocryphal stories that he did nothing from sentiment to his alma mater are hopefully untrue.

[Pérou Flaquettes]

Fucking hell Britain never fails to surprise in its shiteyness. Really don’t understand why young teachers from Ireland would go to England (at least since they started hiring post crash again). The shitty pay scale for new entrants here is way better than teh Brit equivalent.

Do they though? Never met anyone who’d come specifically from Ireland to do their teacher training here in the last, say, 20 years. Of course, I’ve met and worked with a – small – number of Irish teachers in England but they were already here, either born/brought up here or studying here.

Very few non-Irish EU citizens from comparable countries come here now (last 10 years) to do their teacher training and stay in the state system. There used to be quite a lot as the whole package was reasonably attractive but not anymore. I’ve known dozens of these EU citizens from comparable countries in the last decade (there’s defo a before and after phenomenon here) and any hardly of them have stayed in state schools in England. And when they have it’s often been on a part-time basis, 0.5 usually. Many try to go into the private sector, or go abroad (international schools, British schools etc.) or retrain or do something completely different.

I recently met 2 young French teachers recently who joined the profession about 3 years ago (were already living in England), both enthusiastic when they joined, full of vim etc. After only 1 year they already couldn’t wait to leave teaching, they felt crushed by the system, fucking denied pay progression as well last year (budget cuts, academy in the red etc.). One is leaving this year, she’s off to work for an airline company as ground staff, the other one is plotting her escape, brushing up on her German I think and applying to dozens of independent schools everywhere in England. 20-30 years ago, even 15 yrs ago, the bulk of these people would have stayed in the state system most or all of their career, full-time.

[Lang Spoon]

Naw they would train here and then go to England. Same thing with nurses leaving to UK/Aus/States after their studies.

[Pérou Flaquettes]

Right, yes, that's what I thought.

I don’t particularly intend to turn this discussion into a full-on anti-English education system rant, there are other threads for that. I’ll keep it brief then but the English education system wasn’t always that unappetising of course. In the 1990s-2000s, the whole package was OK-to-good from my French viewpoint. The pay was not great when I arrived in 1992 but the career progression prospects were good, the opportunities were good, the working conditions were not brilliant (awfully old/ramshackle school buildings, I think the Tories under Thatcher only had about 80 new schools built, in 11 years) but offset by strong positives (pastoral care etc.) etc.

So when I started enquiring about the English educ system in the late 1980s with a view to possibly work in it (I sent for brochures, visited English schools etc.), it looked pretty good to me. The starting salary was dire (it was ~£8,000 a year circa 1989 I think, then about £11,000 when I arrived in 1992. Mind, a decade & a bit before, circa 1977-78, it was less than £3,000 I remember an ex colleague telling me, then it jumped to about £5,000 in the early 1980s I believe, to boost recruitment) but progression prospects looked good and it offered plenty of opportunities that I wouldn’t have had in France, so I am very grateful to England for that. 30 years ago, it was by and large a good, broad-minded, welcoming system in which you could really develop your skills as a teacher, it was a very open country then and so on. Apart from the country, England, which I'd always liked from a very early age (music, football, culture/literature, language etc.), the English education system appealed to me.

There were many advantages too in staying in the French system, in mainland France, Overseas France or in the vast French international school network. At the time being posted in Martinique etc. or in a French school abroad = huge salary and great lifestyle (not that I was ever after the money). But the few drawbacks drove me to distraction and one could easily feel stuck in a rut. I disliked the inertia and sclerotic mentality that were, I felt, ingrained in the Éducation Nationale. I wanted far more out of my job than just "teach", be an anonymous cog in the system etc. and the Éducation Nationale didn’t deliver that I felt, I had the sort of fulfilling career that I probably wouldn't have had in France. The English teaching sector at the time was more dynamic on many levels and I really liked that. That was of course until New Labour started to mess around with LEAs and screw things up (academisation in the mid-2000s) and the Tories continued NL’s œuvre with fucking gusto.

Obviously, a lot of those positives are pretty much gone now, some of those positives may still be there, on paper, but they are buried so deep under a pile of shite that they go unnoticed.

[Pérou Flaquettes]

France's Queen of Accordeon Yvette Horner dies

Famous French accordeonist Yvette Horner died on Monday at the age of 95. Having become famous as the mascot for the Tour de France, she performed music by David Bowie and Michael Jackson towards the end of her career.

I quite like what her agent said (not the usual "passed away after a long illness") but "Yvette died from a life lived to the full." (morte des suites d'une vie bien remplie).

Jean-Paul Gaultier famously restyled her from the 1980s onwards with a string of exuberant dresses and eccentric stage costumes, and she became his égérie (muse) and a national icon. She was always fairly famous (was part of the Tour de France caravan from 1952 to 1963) but as accordion went out of fashion in the 1960s-70s she too faded out of the limelight for a good while.

Accordion was revived in the 1980s with cult bands such as Rita Mitsuko and Les Négresses Vertes (also the revival of the Guinguettes throughout France helped) and the instrument was also given a good boost by Yvette Horner and her association with J-P Gaultier. Became the first woman to win the World Accordion Championships… in 1948.

Here with Boy Georges in a cover of Summertime:

[E10 Rifle]

A minor issue in the scheme of things, but dear Lord what a pompous self-regarding prick he is

[HeavyDracula]

"But... but... why can't we have a British Macron?"

[Ginger Yellow]

Macron-Merkel statement

Excerpts:

Eurozone budget
We propose establishing a Eurozone budget within the framework of the European Union to promote competitiveness, convergence and stabilization in the euro area, starting in 2021.
Decisions on the funding should take into account the negotiations on the next Multiannual financial framework. Resources would come from both national contributions, allocation of tax revenues and European resources.
The Eurozone budget would be defined on a pluriannual basis.
The purpose of the Eurozone budget is competitiveness and convergence, which would be delivered through investment in innovation and human capital. It could finance new investments and come in substitution of national spending.
We will examine the issue of a European Unemployment Stabilization Fund, for the case of severe economic crises, without transfers. France and Germany will set up a working group with a view to making concrete proposals by the European Council of December 2018.
Strategic decisions on the Eurozone budget will be taken by the Euro zone countries. Decisions on expenditures should be executed by the European Commission.

Backstop
The ESM should be the backstop to the Single Resolution Fund. It should be provided in the form of a credit line. Based on sufficient risk reduction, its entry into force should be earlier than 2024.
The size of the backstop should be close to but not bigger than the size of the SRF. The backstop should replace the direct recapitalization instrument.
Fiscal neutrality over the medium term will be ensured especially through repayment of the common backstop via extraordinary ex-post contributions by the banking sector in three years with a potential extension of two years.
Provided that there is sufficient progress in all relevant fields of risk reduction, to be assessed by the relevant authorities (Commission, SSM and SRB), the entry into force of the backstop should be brought forward before 2024. In 2020, the relevant authorities will provide a report on the trend of NPLs and the building up of subordinated bail-in buffers. On that basis and if risk reduction is satisfactory, the final decision on an accelerated entry into force of the backstop should be taken by the Eurogroup/ECOFIN / European Council.
We will assess the size of the SRF in the context of the end 2018 review and the need to review the intergovernmental agreement to anticipate the backstop.
A term sheet with the precise features of the SRF backstop should be developed for political endorsement by December 2018, based on the work done in the relevant expert group so far.

[Pérou Flaquettes]

A minor issue in the scheme of things, but dear Lord what a pompous self-regarding prick he is

Pompous prick or not (he is one IMO), rest assured that Macron did that mainly for political reasons.

Macron could have perfectly ignored that cheeky Y10 kid (~15 yo) or he could have had a brief word with him or even deflected his cheekiness with humour (he has repartee) and it would have gone more or less unnoticed BUT no, of course he couldn’t, that would have meant passing up a golden opportunity to softly reassert his general agenda, namely wooing the more hardline, conservative rightwing electorate. (He’s already successfully done the “wooing the soft rightwing electorate” bit, thus bagging for himself half of the mainstream right’s electorate at a stroke.)

The teenager in question – casually singing L’Internationale and greeting Macron provocatively, in an inappropriately hypocoristic way (“Ça va Manu ?”) at that particular commemorative time and place (formal context)– probably deserved a little telling-off (to his credit, he apologised straight away) but the manner in which Macron did it sounds more politically suspicious to me than purely cunty. Although Macron walked away… to return to see the kid seconds later (not shown in the British media and most French media outlets) and talk to him in a less preachy, more informal and pedagogical way, he must have sensed that he had a chunk of the left to think of too…

Macron is a complex blend of two conflicting personalities. On one side a formal, didactic, arrogant Énarque type of know-it-all (his class background is provincial Catholic haute bourgeoisie) and on the other a more engaging man with a strong artistic and literary bent (which was evident in interviews when he was minister in the Hollande gvt and then running for presidency, he can have a very matey side and is a bit of a charmer too, he loves himself and tends to bloviate but he also craves popularity. Of course, one could say that this charm trait is something you can turn on at will but, as politicians/heads of state go, Macron is pretty unconventional in his personality so I’m not sure it’s that fake, there really are two distinct sides to him. Naturally, now he’s president he’s far more of the former (i.e an arrogant cunt), part of his personality is repressed, less spontaneous etc. but he has that congeniality in his locker and it sometimes resurfaces. I wish it did more often but the country, like so many others, is leaning to the right so he panders to those voters).

And welcome to the real world Manu. Yes, kids can be brazen, some love to show off in front of their mates (cheeky kid was there with his class), they like to push boundaries and be transgressive, and more so now in the era of Internet dares and stunts. To me, it was a prank/bet with friends from that kid, we’ve all done things like that when we were young and daft.

Politically, Macron felt that he couldn’t let it go (that’s when his built-in radar for spotting and exploiting an oppo comes in bigly handy), especially given the solemnity of the occasion (The Appeal of 18 June) and where it happened, the Mont-Valérien Fort
and its strong associations with the French resistance, he instinctively knew that this incident (if you can call it that) was bound to be blown out of all proportion domestically, and that the balance would tip in his favour (he’s been in the same situation before). It’s also why Macron is so often mingling with the crowds (unlike, say, Theresa May) he knows he will have the upper hand and is cocky enough to think nothing detrimental can happen, at least for the moment (Sarkozy started similarly, desperate to be seen as a natural at ease with ordinary folks, keen to project this man-of-the-people image… until this happened, after which he was far more guarded).

Macron wasn’t opening a new badass EU-funded Parkour course in some sink estate or visiting a local MacDonald’s recently wrecked by José Bové’s Rural Massive, he knew that by making a mountain out of a molehill, he would strike a chord in his new-ish target electorate, Wauquiez’s electorate (Wauquiez is the new hardline Les Républicains leader). Macron absolutely wanted to “mettre en scène” (to stage-manage) the incident and then let the media machine weaponise it for him. This sort of crowd mishap is a godsend for him, du pain bénit, as it invariably leads to debates about how today’s youth has lost all respect, how the good old fashioned values and moral standards have gone to pot, how those irresponsible progressives are ruining society, how there’s far too much bad parenting and teachers’ permissiveness these days. So Macron purposely ramped up the outrage, he knows that it pays off on his right, which is where he’s actively hunting at the minute. It’s almost as if this kid had been planted there and told to say that…

Macron could have simply said to that gobby kid: “This is an important official ceremony so behave and talk respectfully” and moved on but of course that wouldn’t have made headlines and had the same impact. The way he lectures that teenager and pontificates afterwards is risible, (the bits about “starting a revolution” and “feeding oneself, getting a degree etc.” WTF). Risible but politically astute.

Macron’s success on his right, with the Républicains voters (mainstream right= ~25% of the French electorate in a Presidential election), is substantial and the magnitude of it has probably taken him by surprise so he’s keen to hammer home the subliminal message at every opportunity, so determined is he to further weaken the mainstream right, like he did with the Parti Socialiste which has been wiped out in Parliament and is skint (PS had to sell their large uber-swanky 7th district HQs – a cool €46m – and, shock and horror, they have now crossed the Périphérique and, re-gasp, are now squatting a small nondescript building in the forbidding banlieues in Ivry, a communist bastion. OMG, the banlieues… How will they survive in those wild and lawless lands. Next episodes in our series “Socialists’ Survivors”: the Parti Socialiste officials dare to venture outside of their building and learn how to take the Métro).

Macron’s policies have pretty much “phagocytised” (as the French say – cannibalised, gobbled up) the mainstream right and he now wants to drive them into the ground.May 2018 poll: 53% of Les Républicains voters support Macron.

Centre-right and moderate right voters are right behind him (= a good half of the mainstream right voters, excl. the FN) so he’s now after the right of the mainstream right, the older and more conservative right, what was Sarkozy’s prime territory, and that is the sort of thing these people want to hear.

The French mainstream right at the minute is divided and anaemic. They have a new and controversial leader, Laurent Wauquiez (elected last Dec. post Fillon presidential debacle), whose job was to rally the disunited rightwing grassroots troops for the forthcoming elections but who is spectacularly failing to do that. The reason for Wauquiez’s failure is that it’s no cinch to pull that off given the rightwing electorate’s natural attraction for Macron (he’s poached many Les Républicains' stalwarts as well as their policies). And Wauquiez is considered too rightwing, too wooden, with wishy-washy leadership credentials. The bottom line is that rightwingers are not engaging with him, in the way they did with Sarkozy or Fillon, pre Presidential campaign scandal (he was polling 30% pre scandal).

Macron has a tight stranglehold on the centre-right, and this has pushed Wauquiez further to the right, and as Wauquiez is increasingly unable to differentiate himself from Macron economically or in any other significant areas as Macron has hugely encroached on the right’s turf (hard to tell Macron’s policies apart from a standard rightwing party platform) Wauquiez is finding himself squeezed between his right flank and the Front National which is staging a comeback after their epic fail at the June 2017 General Elections (8%). And that small space on the political spectrum (the very conservative and law & order ticket) is only worth 12-15% at best of the total electorate in a Presidential and even less in a General Election (there are other important elections, the Municipals – 2020 – and the Regionals – 2021; the Europeans, next, are of far less importance, low turnouts, about 42%). Of course, the conservative policies & law and order schtick is worth far more electorally but most of that space is taken by the Front National, so that leaves Wauquiez with relative crumbs, uncomfortably wedged between Macron, in effect the new leader of the right, and the Front National cranks.

Wauquiez is in a bind at the mo, and to make matters worse his number 2, Virginie Calmels (a Juppéist cum Fillonist cum Wauquiezist – all this political weathervaning achieved in the space of 9 months) has been just been fired after only 6 months. It was a blatant marriage of convenience anyway between her, an opportunist, and Wauquiez who couldn’t find anyone of note to be his number 2. When she realised how big the disconnect was with the rightwing electorate, she twigged that she was backing the wrong horse. So she did a Chris Coleman at Sunderland, she kept publicly criticising the boss until she got what she wanted, the sack.

Macron is a cynic and is surfing on all this compote. But you’ve got to hand it to him, he is politically smart. (That or his opponents are dumb and happy to be divided. On reflection, it’s probably a bit of both.)

[Pérou Flaquettes]

When I was a teacher, I liked kids such as this particularly impertinent specimen (in small doses – I loved meeting their parents too!), they're usually clever and we had good bantz. So, in his honour, this classic:

[linus]

According to this clever chap, Israel is "the most beautiful democracy in the world".