Bad Medicine: the bitter taste of the Anglo-Saxon model

My latest piece, Bad Medicine, on UK coverage of the French presidential election, is available now on the UK Watch blog.

An excerpt:

"In recent weeks, our political class has gleefully taken the French presidential election as a high profile opportunity to bang the drum for the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ economic model. For British commentators, the French malady of high unemployment and general inefficiency can have but one cure: the French must accept that we were right and they were wrong, and take their neo-liberal medicine.

In February this year, UNICEF produced a study of child welfare in the industrialised countries. British children were found to be the worst off out of those in twenty one developed economies. After nearly three decades of neoliberalism post-1979, child poverty had doubled. France may have only come sixteenth out of twenty one. But it came five places higher than the country whose model the UK commentariat are so keen for it to adopt. In fact, it was Holland, Sweden, Denmark and Finland – the countries operating the so called “Nordic” economic model – that came in first, second, third and fourth"

Read the rest here.

Also on the elections, gender in the Royal v Sarkozy debate and an interesting deconstruction of the Financial Times' take on the French economy.