Peter Jackson column
Oct 12 2006 By Peter Jackson, The Journal
To be born British is to win the lottery of life - or so I was always led to believe. It seems however, that increasing numbers of my fellow countrymen and countrywomen, disagree.
In fact, according to a report published earlier this week, one in five Britons would rather be French.
A survey of more than 1,000 people aged under 50 indicated that 22% would prefer to have been born in France, while 32% would rather live there.
Pourquoi? Well, theories range from the weather and food to the more relaxed way of life and even to the influence of French football stars such as Thierry Henry.
I suspect that - apart from the Thierry Henry thing - we have all been there, usually on the first Monday morning back at work after two weeks in the Dordogne.
But it surprises me that one in five of the population does not see this yearning for la vie en rose for what it really is - an idle daydream.
If France is so wonderful, how come the numbers of French coming to live in the UK each year are greater than the traffic in the opposite direction? It is estimated that there are 300,000 to 400,000 French people living in the UK, most of whom are under 35, and three quarters of whom are living in London.
The reasons are not hard to find. Unemployment in France is running at 9.2%, almost double the UK rate because of extremely high non-wage costs making people too expensive to hire. Over the years, this has made firms increasingly reluctant to take people on, preferring instead to invest in machines - the reason for the higher productivity of French workers.
This high unemployment means wage growth is well below UK levels and, over the past decade, national income per head has slipped below that in Britain. As a result of this sclerotic economy thousands of young French people are coming to the UK to find well-paid jobs and to escape the increasing social unrest at home, which saw riots last summer and protests on the streets this spring.
The truth that one in five of us needs to wake up to is that France is only a good place to live if you don't need to work.
