When comparing Britain with France, both sides protest that it is a case of vive la différence.
However, in one grim respect the two countries are very similar: both are living way beyond their means.
The Labour government in Britain has made pitiful attempts not to cut public spending, but to slow down the rate at which it and the national debt are rising.
Its latest effort was to cut the welfare bill, from which it had to back down when backbenchers threatened to defeat it in the House of Commons (which would have been quite an achievement, given Labour has a notional majority of 148, and would have spelt the end of Sir Keir Starmer as prime minister).
A 'moment of truth'
François Bayrou has considerably more guts, bred of surviving almost eight months as prime minister, making him a veritable veteran in the context of the times.
On July 15 he told the French people that public spending had to be cut by €43.8billion.
He delivered his message against a backdrop bearing the slogan ‘le moment de vérité’, which indeed it was.
The British public have been shielded from the truth about their profligacy for years by governments of all hues; not so, now, the French.
Mr Bayrou said an attempt to reduce France’s financial woes was “the last stop before the cliff, before we are crushed by the debt”.
This was no overstatement. France’s “addiction” to public spending is a predilection it has very much in common with les rosbifs.
Both want lavish public services, and assume someone else – someone richer than them – will pay.
In Britain, that philosophy is in the process of being tested to beyond destruction. An estimated 16,500 millionaires left last year, the largest exodus from any country for a decade.
If wealth creators flee and stop paying taxes, the poorer people left behind must be taxed more.
This, in turn, suffocates enterprise and growth and drives debt up still further: it is a vicious circle.
Battles with left and right
Mr Bayrou is determined to try to stop the debacle that is happening in Britain also happening in France, and he is quite right to do so.
The left are, inevitably, shouting at him, with Jean-Luc Mélenchon and his cronies accusing him of waging a form of class war.
In fact, what Mr Bayrou has proposed is almost certainly not enough.
France is in flagrant violation of European Union rules on the size of its deficit.
Last year it reached 5.8% of GDP, or €168.6billion, and Mr Bayrou hopes to bring it down to 3% by 2029.
It is not as if he can do all this in the face of across the board spending restraint: over the same period Mr Macron, in acknowledgement of the threat Russia poses to European security, has proposed to double France’s defence budget.
To try to persuade French voters to go along with this, Mr Bayrou explicitly served up the example of Greece, virtually bankrupted and pitched into severe austerity a few years ago.
That, he indicated, was the price of doing nothing.
A political maneuver?
His proposed cuts look pretty modest; reducing the public payroll, freezing welfare benefits and tax thresholds rather than increasing them in line with inflation, a ‘solidarity contribution’ for the very rich (which may well, of course, drive some of them to Monaco [if non-French] or Switzerland) and, most bizarre of all, the abolition of two bank holidays.
Some commentators have concluded that this suggestion is but a stunt to detract attention from the real unpleasantness that may lie in the Bayrou programme.
The teaching profession and tourist bodies rapidly condemned the idea.
Whatever lies behind the prime minister’s intentions, a poll in Le Figaro suggested that eight out of 10 people in France thought that getting the economy under control was beyond Mr Bayrou.
Some 87% felt that their purchasing power was about to be reduced.
The politics of all this comes down to one immediate question: will the proposals provoke a vote of censure for Mr Bayrou, and, if so, will he suffer the same fate as his predecessor, Michel Barnier, when he tried and failed to get a budget through last autumn?
That depends, as does so much else in French politics these days, on what happens in the Rassemblement National.
They were swift to criticise his choice of savings, with one MP, Jean-Philippe Tanguy, asking why there was no mention of cutting the budget to support immigration, or of reducing the contribution France makes to a European Union that many French – and not just supporters of the RN – see as over-bureaucratic, corrupt and wasteful.
If the RN chooses to throw in its lot with the left and the hard-left and bring Mr Bayrou down, what do they imagine might replace him?
If Mr Bayrou does fall – and anything could happen – President Macron could find a new prime minister to take his place.
Good luck with that. The year or so since the last elections to parliament has seen that body become largely dysfunctional and the governance of France, as a consequence, go adrift.
One often thinks that Mr Bayrou has only survived as long as he has because no one else in his or her right mind would want the job.
He only got his last budget through by using article 49.3 of the constitution to force it into law.
A defeat in a vote of no confidence could well precipitate an election, which might prove an even worse gamble for Mr Macron than last year’s. If he ends up with an even more hostile parliament than he already has, what price his own survival?
