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During 23 years with the BBC, and a 43 year journalistic career (when he was trained to use clear and simple language, avoiding jargon), for our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry, it has always been fascinating to watch as political ideas go in and out of fashion, and today it is state intervention, which rioters in France appear to want more of, and as the Tory opposition accuse the Welsh Government of undertaking.
It is always very hard when rioting and looting are underway, to work out what the protesters actually WANT.
But they appear to be demanding MORE rather than less intervention by the French state, and in this, it seems, they may have popular backing as this idea is back in fashion today (not least in Wales).
Time was that the idea of state intervention was anathema to political parties.
For Labour it was that the market should be properly regulated, while for the Tories it was more that “you can’t buck the market” as Margaret Thatcher famously declared.
But both, effectively, thought the market should rule, and state intervention must be kept to a minimum.
Now though it looks as though the big political idea is that you can indeed ‘buck the market’…
Even as the tear gas clears in France (and more rioting is planned for the weekend), it appears that some of the protesters demands, while totally confused, may chime with what is happening today (on an altogether less violent basis).
They SEEM to want 10 billion Euros to stop doing it, and conditions in High Schools improved.
A commission of inquiry is being set up to establish the causes of the unrest, while authorities have assigned 200 investigators to identify and track down those involved in the street violence.
The unrest may be spreading to Italy too (although on a much smaller scale), where there is already huge state intervention in cracking down on illegal immigration.
The unrest jolted Prime Minister (PM) Giorgia Meloni’s Government into introducing new security measures.
Obviously the first demand of French protesters is unlikely to be met, and while conditions in state schools may need improving, rioting is no way of going about alerting the authorities to this fact.
But generally, at an international level, French ideas of state intervention, are being greeted more warmly.
Let’s look at Brussels first. These days French-infused scepticism of globalisation and unfettered markets is close to being orthodoxy.
Those EU rules preventing public money from being showered onto national champions are all but forgotten: subsidies once considered evidence of economic illiteracy are now presented as proof of strategic sophistication.
‘Industrial policy’ has gone from taboo to mainstream, and the French idea is looked on favourably by policy makers, that Europe has been naive in practising economic self-restraint while the United States of America (USA) and China brazenly pursue it.
Then, closer to home, there is Wales and what the Welsh Government (WG) is doing, or utterances by the First Minister of Wales (FMW) Rhun ap Iorwerth in the past.
For example, a National Care Service has been endorsed.
The WG says about it: “It builds on the Programme for Government commitment to ensure people can access high-quality, joined-up care and support wherever they live in Wales.
“This represents the next step in the Welsh approach to reforming social care, while continuing to focus on what matters most to people and communities.”
The Welsh Conservatives are incredibly agitated about what is happening, and don’t like the idea of intervening in markets.
So rioting is only part of it – the bigger picture shows that state intervention is on the way back…
The memories of Phil’s decades-long award-winning career in journalism (when big political changes often dominated), as he was gripped by the rare disabling condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order it now!
