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Largely, I think, because the manufacturing economy in the UK was killed off 30 years ago by Maggie Thatcher, drunk at the time on North Sea Oil and the mad belief that The City could provide sufficient wealth for those that mattered to her and her ilk. Damn the rest.

France, on the other hand has only fairly recently come up against the Great Wall of China's block to competitiveness in her traditional industries and has yet to figure out a response.

I certainly hope France doesn't go the way the UK did.

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I agree almost totally, she set out to destroy the power of the unions who were on strike every other week and also to dismantle grossly inefficient industries. Move forward to 2014 and that describes France. The land of strikes and grossly inefficient industries that are disappearing by the week.
I accept the comment about the City.
Today the UK has slowly re-invented work - not real work - more of a "you pretend to work and we will pretend to pay you" sort of work.
There are more people "working" in the UK than ever before.
In France, the unemployment figures are reduced by the number of government and local council workers in the "top heavy" bureaucracy that is France.
France is about to go/going through the pains the UK experienced in the 80s and 90s.
France is not the country to move to without having a job lined up.

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Having just come back from a month's holiday in a sun-soaked UK (even as far north as John o'Groats:thumbup:), one thing that struck me was how easy it is to get a job, especially when compared with France. This particularly applies to young people, and there is definitely a feeling that even if the job one is in isn't much to write home about, another, better one is on the way. This is a feeling I just don't have here. I wouldn't recommend anyone's coming over here without a job already lined up either. Today's France is most definitely the sick man of Europe, a title previously held by the UK in the 70s and Germany a mere 15 years ago, so there is hope. I agree that Hollande and his bunch of pretend ministers haven't got much of a clue as to what to do, but putting France's economic woes solely down to an ever-growing army of civil servants is a little one-sided. There is no proof that economic prosperity is linked to the numbers of public sector workers. The UK employs roughly the same numbers (five and a half million) as France does, so one has to look elsewhere for an explanation as to why a country like France, with all that she has going for her, is in such dire straits.
PB

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I think the current job security that people have with a CDI is not helping, lots of companies are carrying dead weight and CDI's don't encourage employees to give their best. A competitive employment sector in line with the rest on Europe would give folk a shake up.

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I Think some of the problems can be traced to the last time the Socialists were in Power. The second worst president of the Fifth Republic began the slide by legislating for retirement ages no one could possibly afford to finance, the working week was cut, the Franc was devalued to keep the industries afloat that should have gone under then. Hollande has just continued along the same lines as Mitterand, and a bath of steel awaits...
Blackie

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Who was the 'first worst' pres. for you?

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They're both as bad as each other IMO, but Mitterand started the economic downslide with his 35-hour week paid 39 hours. Even a child could calculate that this wouldn't create jobs...:(

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I Think that Hollande is out of his depth and simply not up to the job (which he got by default, thanks to Strauss Kahn's philandering and Marine le Pen's encouragement to her followers to stay home from round 2 of the presidential vote, but Mitterand gets my vote as worst, not least for his shady dealings with the Vichy govt during WW2. The fact that he is praised to the skies by the left and centre of today is quite staggering.
Blackie

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It was Jospin who introduced the 35-hour week during his cohabitation with Chirac. Whilst I would agree that the measure was, and still is, foolish, on his election in 1981 Mitterrand reduced the working week from 40 to 39 hours.

Having lived in France under De Gaulle, Pompidou, Giscard, Mitterrand et al, I wouldn't say that Mitterrand was the worst, simply because he did such a lot to free France from the straitjacket she had been stuck with since the return to power of De Gaulle. Much greater freedom of speech, the end of censorship, a country that became far more open, tolerant and pleasant to live in, the abolition of the death penalty... these are the things I would be grateful to Mitterrand for, plus his undeniable class and his attempts to carry through the construction of Europe, even if today we can see the weaknesses of that. Yes, his economic policies were a disaster, he may have had questionable behaviour from a personal point of view but compared with Giscard, Chirac, Sarkozy and now Hollande, in my humble opinion, for what that's worth, I think he deserves to be placed further up the table than the worst we've ever had. I'd rather have him than a geriatric general who had no qualms about appearing on television in military uniform. When others have done that, they are immediately classified as fascist....
What I would like to see in my lifetime would be a new constitution that would reduce the exorbitant powers given to the president and set up a Parliament with teeth. Dream on...

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Well said PB and with the voice of someone who lived through all those governments and clearly took notice of their politics all the while.

Still, we can't let an ugly fact spoil a beautiful theory can we? Mitterand was a Socialist and therefore, by today's definition, evil, n'est-de pas?

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My bad!:o

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Well it was expected sooner or later, and today the media are full of it!

We knew the ship was adrift in stormy seas; now some of its government ministers are frantically abandoning ship (granted - some of them were - and are still being pushed). Amongst this stormy turmoil the axe has fallen, and today the prime minister has presented to the President the resignation of his government after less than only 5 months. A reshuffle is currently in progress.
This governmental meltdown comes after disastrous economic performance, and record-breaking unemployment figures.
The next few days/weeks are worth following very closely politically speaking.

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Do you honestly think anything will change? I don't. If there were any rabbits in the beret, don't you think somebody would have pulled them out long before now?
It's just a bit of posturing to the electorate and the rest of Europe to say 'Look at us taking radical action', and they hope that the smokescreen will buy them a bit of time before everyone sees that it's the same old clowns doing the same old pantomime, maybe swapped roles a bit, but delivering the same lack of results.
Although I would love to be wrong.