Sent by G. Drummond, Carros

I have read in your magazine that some EU citizens are having problems obtaining resident cards. My experience at the prefecture is that they refuse to issue them to EU citizens as we are meant to have an automatic right to reside here and don’t need a card. On the other hand, I am sometimes asked for this card and as you have pointed out, it is a useful substitute for the identity card which French citizens have. Can I be refused this card?

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Sent by Gregoire Pelletier, by email

I notice that in your list of consulates you ascribe the US consular agency in Nice and consulate in Paris to “America”. This will irritate those of us from the continent named after Mr Vespucci who do not believe words like “America” and “American” are to be used exclusively of US citizens. In Quebec French – often a linguistic pioneer (think courriel for e-mail) – we are increasingly using the word “Etats-Unien” for a person from south of the border rather than “Americain”; we don’t like to use “Amérique” as meaning just the US. Please think about this.

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"Warm beer and boules": That was a recent headline in the UK Independent. It summarised in four words the possible cultural mix that would have emerged if, a half century ago, Britain and France had merged or if France had joined the Commonwealth. Too crazy to think about? Well, actually not quite. Recently released government papers show that during the developing Suez crisis in 1956 Guy Mollet, the French socialist Prime Minister, made exactly the two suggestions I’ve mentioned. The Brits dismissed the idea almost immediately and, of course, a year later the French had joined the new European Economic Community, precursor of the EU. What reports of this historical curiosity missed is that in 1940 Churchill had made a similar proposal, inviting France to accept dominion status within the Commonwealth. De Gaulle snorted a very quick "Non ..."

One remark by Guy Mollet (a former teacher, by the way) that there would be “no difficulty in accepting the headship of Her Majesty the Queen”. Likely he was right. The French have always been fascinated by the British Royal Family and this was illustrated again by the success of Stephen Frears's film The Queen. A million people went to see it here during its first two and a half months on release. As Paris-Match respectfully put it, it offered “a subtle and complex portrait of an admirable woman”.

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A while back I wrote under that title a brief item pointing out why I wouldn’t want to join the 250,000 Brits who’ve opted for year-round residence in the South of Spain. Now I’ve noticed in the newsletter of the British Association in Cannes an account – again headed by those three words – by Tony Baccanello of his unhappy experiences with the Spanish property market. In brief, his dealings with a couple of Costa developers (Dutch, in fact) ended with his getting badly beaten up and his BMW being sprayed with acid and he lost a lot of money. Frankly, we’re talking of a part of Europe that just doesn’t seem a nice place to be. As a Telegraph report put it recently, it’s “awash with feuding criminal gangs, laundered dirty money and corrupt local officials”.

But it’s not just the number of bad hats hanging up there that’s a dissuasive. A recent report from a Madrid research institute drew attention to the problems implicit in the region’s frantic building boom. Currently, 35 per cent of Spain’s Mediterranean coast is built up, rising to over 50 per cent on the Costa del Sol and the Costa Blanca and with extensive development inland. The report concluded, grimly: “It seems unlikely that the increasing demand for power and water can be satisfied.” No, it’s not the place to be ...

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By Valda Lynen 

1) Anyone who has lived here long enough knows that communication in the public sector is a luxury. Once more I was 'had' by lack of information.

Waiting for a sum of money which was likely to take more than a month to arrive, my girlfriend in England offered to help with a small bridging loan. To free up my budget for a holiday, I agreed. She preferred to send me a cheque in sterling. It went into the bank on the 2nd May. I explained to the cashier that it was to cover my account until my money arrived. She took the cheque and gave me a chit.

Knowing that it would cost a bit to change the currency etc., I waiting patiently. 3 weeks passed. I phoned to the bank's telephone centre – they knew nothing. Asked them to ask my bank to phone me back – they didn't. Went back to the bank... cashier explained, "Trois semaines? C'est normale."

"So why didn't you tell me that it took so long, I told you why I was doing it."

"I didn't know that you didn't know."

"It takes half a second to do money transactions around the world, how come my measly little cheque lies dormant day after day?" The money hadn't even left my friend's account, so I couldn't even accuse them of keeping the money in transit.

Two questions here. Why does it take so long? and Why wasn't I told?

The cheque was finally cleared on the 8th June. One month and 6 days after it was handed in. My sum of money had already arrived, so the whole thing was a waste of time. It's cost me the charges on the transfer, the stress of waiting and phoning and now I must reverse the whole procedure to repay my patient friend, with more charges.

2) On the aforesaid holiday in Britain at the beginning of June, I changed some euros at the airport, and decided to pay for any shopping with my Visa card. Each day I went to the hole in the wall of the local bank for some extra cash for the usual restaurant meals and the odd taxi. It mentioned that there would be a charge for the transaction, was I agreed? Yes, well, it was convenient and it couldn't be more than about £5 so I went ahead. Imagine my shock when I got home and looked at my account. For every £100 I took out, they charged me £147! Nearly 50% on top! The logic was, in my mind, that if I got my money from the machine, I was not using up the precious time of a employee, therefore the cost would reflect that.

Question: Why don't they display on the screen the % charged? It's lack of information again. Is it just to trap naive customers like me? Is that how they make their millions?

The most frustrating thing of all is that the individual is so insignificant, that any complaint would be like spitting at a juggernaut, like an ant getting the attention of an elephant, like the very worst aspect of globalisation.

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For some time now it’s been evident that there’s a migratory movement in the other direction with French citizens opting to live and work in the UK. This has produced what demographers call a lop-aged situation, well described by Jean-Pierre Raffarin when he remarked to Tony Blair that “we send you our young people and in return we get your oldies”. Exactly: of the minimum 200,000 Gauls now settled in the UK a majority are young and working. When asked what motivated their move most of them say that it’s easier to find work there, workplaces are more open and less hierarchised and, especially for anyone going into business on their own, there’s much less need to tangle with unhelpful bureaucrats.

Traditionally, the French weren’t keen on living abroad. As Agnès Catherine Poirier, a London-based journalist, explains, “They had everything they needed at home ... that’s no longer the case.” In a place like Ashford, Kent, for example, scores of French have discovered a land of opportunity ... and to insure against gnawing nostalgia they support some excellent restaurants and a weekly food market. It was people like these adoptive Ashfordiens who told TNS Sofres pollsters recently that they felt they were in England “indefinitely”. I wonder. With age comes, if not wisdom, certainly infirmity and well before they’ve bought their first walking-stick many of them may feel they want better health care than the NHS can provide; if they have kids, they’ll certainly have qualms about puttint them into John Stonehouse Comprehensive. And how do they feel about (as Tony Blair wants them to) working till 67 for a UK-style pension? That much abused “French social model”, even with the attendant bureaucracy, has much to be said for it.
 

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Many years ago, and after the final departure from the scene of Jacque Médecin, we remarked in these columns that, “Nice’s gravy train has slowed down and some passengers have been forced to get off but sooner of later others will climb aboard and it will pick up speed again.”
This prediction has been confirmed on numerous occasions.

Most recently the old days of Jacquou were recalled at the end of June when police raided offices at city hall and later arrested Martial Meunier-Jourde, mayor Peyrat’s head of protocol and international relations, and Daniel Véran, chief of the municipal police. The two men are under investigation for allegedly splitting between them a one million euro bribe related to the award of a contract for the building of a new 4 sitar hotel in Nice.

Although both men are out on bail, inquires into this later affair niçoise are likely to take some time. Jacques Peyrat has complained about the media coverage and evoked, “the presumption of innocence” but even some of his long-term supporters have been critical, commenting on his poor judgement in choosing staff and claiming, like Auguste Verola, that “he only hears what he wants to hear”.

This latest scandal illuminates Peyrat’s famous remark after refusing a bid from a German company for one of the tramway contracts that “they wouldn’t understand our niçoise values”. Germans, and some other foreigners, who may purse their lips at this region’s endemic corruption should ponder another quotation. “I belong,” Jacques Medecin once told Patrick Middleton in an interview, “to an ancient Mediterranean political tradition in which you do good for others but you also do good for yourself.”


 

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Reader George Renfrew looks at whether the British example is one President Sarkozy should follow and why the French should be careful of what they wish for.

I am struck by the number of Britons who want to leave Britain. Ten per cent have already done so and the flow continues at the rate of 200,000 a year. Yet last year, 600,000 foreigners streamed in from former colonies and from recently “EU-ed” Eastern Europe . The new French president doesn’t hide his admiration for the British model but is this what the French people really want?

Does France want to replace Britain as the holder of Europe’s highest rates of functional illiteracy, street crime, gratuitous stabbings, drug use, private debt, personal bankruptcy, house repossession, car theft, domestic violence, child abuse, public drunkenness and teenage pregnancy? Do they want their elderly to finish in financial distress while taxpayer’s millions are handed out to new arrivals who haven’t – and never will – pay a penny into the system? Do they want Europe’s most benevolent welfare state for outsiders (a system which, bizarrely, was fostered by Margaret Thatcher in order to attract the low-cost foreign labour demanded by business)

If President Sarkozy succeeds in making France like Britain, here is what the French will get:
Months-long waits to see a doctor for the simplest medical or dental act; several months’ salary for medical procedures that are currently free; cancer and heart disease survival rates lower than even Poland’s; private health insurance with companies that will leave them high and dry when they go bankrupt; MRSA-ridden hospitals run on economic rather than on medical grounds and where many patients come out sicker than when they went in; women giving birth in hospital corridors and even in hospital toilets; hospital staff that don’t speak the native language.

The pensions they’ve worked hard to accumulate tied up in private schemes that often go broke if the high flying “boss” hasn’t already absconded with the funds; the elderly forced to work into their 80s before perishing of neglect in shoddy understaffed care homes; appalling public transport at outrageous prices; motorways clogged to a standstill; a system of higher education that all too often admits students depending upon the wealth of the parents and not the academic abilities of the student; derelict state schools where discipline is as non-existent as is learning;  councils with the right to tax the beauty of the view from their home.

Gangs of armed feral youths roaming urban streets; a police force so afraid of being accused of human rights abuse that it remains largely invisible; extremist Islamic fanatics allowed to openly preach hate and violence in the name of "freedom of religion"; the most crowded prisons in Europe;  the “right” of foreigners to be tried in the language of their choice even if they fluently speak the national language;  over 12% of inhabitants who can’t speak that language; masses of unemployed foreigners granted cash benefits from the day they arrive and forevermore without ever having paid anything in and without ever appearing in the official unemployment statistics; fewer rights on a citizen’s return from a stint abroad than a newly arrived foreigner has.

Fathers holding two jobs just to repay the mortgage on an average family home; working hours so long that parents rarely see their families and only have a few days vacation each year; families holding so much debt that many can never hope to repay it; foreign investors holding ownership and control of most national flagship companies; no remaining national auto manufacturers;  the stench and health risks that go with infrequent rubbish collection; poor pensioners imprisoned for refusing to pay an outrageous council tax while rich celebrities like Pete Doherty are allowed to drug and drive without punishment.

We’re told that Britain is ever-so-wealthy but that is clearly nonsense. Wealthy countries don’t live this poorly and the British people see little evidence of this theoretical wealth. Their private debt exceeds GDP and therefore their ability to pay it back. That’s wealth?

If we are truly the world’s fourth richest country then who’s holding all the money? Not the Great British public who worked to create all that wealth, that’s for sure.

On the other hand, we’re told that France is on the decline but in practice the superior quality of French life is still indisputably better than the British way. The nay-sayers tell us that the fall of France is just around the corner but they’ve been predicting that for decades and it hasn’t happened yet. Yet the demise of Britain has indeed happened without a doubt. Does France (or any other country) really want to imitate the abysmal quality of the average Briton’s way of life? A quality that fuelled the desire to leave in so many of us?

If the French knew the truth about the life of the average Briton they would hope that imitating the past four decades of British economic and social policies is not what President Sarkozy has in mind. We don’t know whether the French model will endure but we do know that the British economic model has already abysmally failed all but a very few Britons. 

George Renfrew
 

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Sent by Edwin Christopher, London

I attended the Nice Jazz Festival this summer and was appalled at the state of the public loos there. Unclean, poorly signposted and too few. What a disgraceful example to visitors. There were no extra portable ones to handle the big crowds and of course there was the usual old person collecting entrance money.

The worst I’ve seen was at Roland Garros during the French Open tennis – very few loo blocks, money collectors, far too few ladies’ loos so huge queues for the poor dears and it was raining heavily. We’re not perfect here in England but at all the outdoor events I’ve been to recently – Wimbledon, polo, concerts – facilities have been excellent and free!

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Sent in by Jo Green, Horsham, UK

In response to your article of some time back on alcoholism which I’ve just caught up with. “We live among a drinking people” you say – dead right and it’s very easy to get sucked in.

I only intended to stay in France ten days but one Stella led to another and I ran out of money. In order to get back to England I had to get a job. I worked in Antibes in a hotel, then in a bar, and then on the boats – drinking all the time. On and on I went all over the Med.

Eventually I returned to England with liver cirrhosis, brain addled, kidney problems, gut trouble. You may not think you’re overdoing it but you probably are if you really take stock. The trouble is you don’t really feel or see these things going on inside.

Six years I’ve been in rehab now. I’d say please do be careful. Eating properly is the main thing – if you’re going to drink like the locals then follow their eating habits as well. You’ll feel much fitter. And drink loads of water.

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Sent by Mike Pope, Le Bar sur Loup

Since January I’ve learnt of dozens of marginal driving offences that cause doubt as to the true motives of the police purge for better road safety.

I was detained for almost 40 minutes by the Gendarme National (Grasse) roadside check in Mouans Sartoux at midnight at the end of July, receiving an on the spot fine of €90 because the forward “fog lamps” were on. The officer, with an officious “road safety-conscious” comportment, revealed to me that these are an annoyance to other drivers, and positioning me in front of my car, he unsuccessfully demonstrated the nuisance they cause.

These lamps do not cause annoyance to oncoming traffic, they shine down onto the road and do not dazzle, unlike full-beam head lamps or the all too frequent misaligned head lights. If anything, they enhance safety on poorly lit roads and increase your arc of visibility significantly.

A new law states that they may only be used in fog, snow and heavy rain, and are not to be used in towns. Fair enough, I should have remembered to switch them off after leaving a poorly lit back road, but being seen is better than not and at least all my lights work.

So, as he laboured over writing out an illegible PV, it was particularly maddening to watch a succession of delinquents on scooters without helmets and exhaust silencers and clapped out cars going by without any lights on at all, way over the speed limit, while they dealt with me, the big criminal! Well, those kids would not have had any cash or credit. Strategically staged outside a bank with a functional ATM, the whole set up seemed a bit shifty and another good earner for the underfunded police forces, whose purge to improve road safety is seemingly not their primary goal. The fine didn’t hurt me, but the principle left me resentful. A warning for an infringement doesn’t make money, but it would have left me with more respect for the gendarmes, whose job we all know is not easy or pleasant.

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There is a paranoid impression in most expat communities that local opinion and practices are somehow skewed against “us”. But after almost four decades of observation I find that, on the whole, “the locals” tend to treat us better than they do their own brethren. Nevertheless I’ve had a complaint from an American reader who feels that “they” are unreasonable in refusing driving licences from all but a few US states. This is, according to him, “French bureaucracy and petty meanness gone mad”. In reality the explanation is simple – France accepts US licences only from those US states which accept French ones. So ask your congressman to recognise French licences and you’ll be fine.

Mike Meade

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According to the London correspondent of the New York Times, Kate Middleton’s mum upset the Queen – I don’t believe this, actually – by asking for “the toilet”... instead of “the bathroom”. That just shows you, by the way, how hard it is for a foreigner to get a grip on British English. If that correspondent asks for “the bathroom” she could be in for some frustration. But, as I say, I think this whole class language thing was blown out of all proportion as a key to the Kate and William split. Of course, there are some dreary old buffers who’d like to keep on fussing away. The Earl of Onslow spluttered to a journalist that for him “it was impossible to force the word ‘toilet’ between my lips”.

Yes, and there are still a few people who worry about how someone holds his fork or eats bread at dinner. Sad, really. But – a Frenchman asked me recently – how important is “class” in the British community here? I’ve been an observer now for something over thirty years and certainly there’s been a change. Above all, that community is now bigger and more varied. Early on in my time here I was told that one (to me) unappealing chap was a “very good sort ... was Head of School at Wellington”. You don’t hear that kind of nonsense now. What is true, though, along the Coast and above all in Monaco, is that the British cash-based system of social ranking has clearly taken root. Money talks and any slob who’s really loaded can ask for “the bog” and nobody turns a hair. Bernard Shaw’s view that “when an Englishman opens his mouth he gives another Englishman cause to despise him” is now very old hat.

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Sorry Joan but what you’re saying is just plain silly

Last summer actress Joan Collins allowed herself this outburst in the UK Spectator: “We’ve had, by law, to install four hideously ugly alarm posts on each corner of our gorgeous infinity pool in the South of France, creating an infrared barrier which is supposed to prevent people drowning. The alarm is supposed to emit a high-pitched whistle except that it only works if the potential drownee is wearing a complicated plastic bracelet – quelle horreur! It is a tragic truth that dozens of children drown in ponds, bathtubs and in the sea every year, but I’m not sure that this device will help much. And what new rule will we be forced to adopt next? A cover over every frog pond? Railings around the ocean? The mind shudders!”

It takes less than three minutes

Sadly, the evidence is that the new law is being widely ignored. Well, my mind shudders rather at the thought that Joan Collins’s huffing and puffing about what she calls “this totally ridiculous nanny-state law” could lead anyone to ignore the rules to ensure pool safety. Accidents still happen but the “nanny-state law” has helped reduce the death-toll of children – in both 2004 and 2005, before the new legislation was applied, four under-fives drowned in pools in the Alpes-Maritimes alone. It takes less than three minutes for a toddler to drown in 20 centimetres of water.

As some readers will have noted, Ms Collins hasn’t even understood its provisions which came into force at the beginning of last year. She wasn’t compelled “to install four hideously ugly alarm posts”. She had a choice of four solutions: an alarm system, a fence, a cover or a canopy entirely enclosing the pool. Experts, like Rupert Scott of Enclôture, claim that a fence is the best solution since “it’s as foolproof as possible”.

From Riviera Reporter Issue 121, June/July 2007

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IT FIGURES!

When veteran economic journalist Jean-Pierre Largillet called me in October about a piece he was doing for Nice-Matin on the Riviera’s resident foreign communities he immediately got on to the subject of demographics. Jean-Pierre had just been told by Riviera Radio that the anglophone population was “about 200,000”. Apart from the fact that this is ten times the officially recognised figure, it’s obvious to even a casual observer that 10% of Côte d’Azur residents are not native anglophones. Largillet seemed vexed that anyone would think an expert like himself would believe such preposterous “statistics” and cited in print my reference to around 40,000 anglophones in Alpes Maritimes and Monaco as a more accurate number.

Years ago we debunked the “research” of Alan Searles and his Media Matters company who – commissioned by Per Mortensen’s Riviera Radio – came up with a comically inaccurate “427,162 resident and semi-resident English-speakers” on the Côte d’Azur. As it turned out, Searles had simply scooped some immigration figures off the internet, added a vague coefficient and, for the sake of his own – and his client’s – convenience, had assumed all resident foreigners to be English-speaking. He completely ignored the fact that (according to the most recent official figures) 44.14% of foreign residents here are North Africans and 40.15% are either Italian, Belgian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Turkish or Asian. If “English-speaking” were to include Britons, North Americans, Australians, South Africans, New Zealanders, Dutch and Scandinavians, the officially counted anglophone residents would total about 9% of all the foreign residents of the Alpes Maritimes and less than 1% of the region’s total population. It has to be said that Searles doesn’t speak French (we asked him), and his company Media Matters was not, as claimed, a member of the Market Research Society (we asked them), so his outrageous inaccuracies may not have been obvious to him. His client, however, would have known better.

SO, HOW MANY ANGLOPHONES?

We’re not talking about visitors – the one-off or even the once-yearly tourists or convention-goers as calculated by the CRT. For our purposes, a Riviera resident is someone who declares himself as such to the authorities, or who keeps a second home here, or who is an “undeclared” (illegal) resident but nevertheless present much of the year.

Let’s take Monaco first. Figures there are accurate: you don’t live in the principality without being known to the authorities. Recent census figures will be available soon, but the previous Monaco census in 1990 showed the total population of 29,972 comprising 2.33% Britons and 0.68% Americans. Largillet notes that, of the present 35,000 or so Monaco residents, more than half are either French or Monegasque and roughly 10,000 are Italian. That leaves about 7500 for the rest. Optimistically, about 5500 of these could be English-speakers, many of them “tax residents” and, as we know from our subscriber list, often absent.

Now for the Alpes Maritimes. In 1999, British holders of resident permits numbered 3958 and North Americans totalled 1508. Adding the Dutch, Scandinavians, South Africans, New Zealanders and Australians makes 8175 registered anglophones. Add 25% for the under 18 year-olds (who do not need permits) bringing the officially registered total to about 9800 English-speakers. Pushing probabilities to the limit, we double that figure to take in the illegals, and come to 19,600.

Second-home owners: these figures are accurate (you can’t hide a house), and property owners are either declared as primary (in which case they have resident permits) or secondary residents (in which case they don’t). The last time an official study was published by the Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur (since rebaptised SIRIUS) was in 1995 when there were 136,300 secondary residences in the Alpes Maritimes of which only 12% were owned by foreigners. About half of these were Italian, German, Swiss, etc leaving a total of 8160 for the others. Again, we’ll make a very optimistic presumption – that half of these are English-speakers who do not hold resident permits (the others are counted formally already) and that each household has 2.8 members (as quoted in the report). This puts that group at a maximum of 11,424.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Now we add all this together and come to a credible figure for legal and illegal resident and semi-resident anglophones of Alpes Maritimes and Monaco: 36,500. Unregistered yacht crew plus Var residents can’t possibly come to more than 10,000. That puts the Riviera’s anglophone community at something around 46,000.

A case could be made for more – perhaps as many as 60,000 – but even by using definitions of “Riviera”, “resident” and “English-speaker” straight out of Bill Clinton’s Dictionary (“how do you define ‘sex’”?) – a figure of 200,000 is (as Hillary would say) “fuzzy math”. Anyone who uses such a figure for business reasons is either remarkably ignorant of the real demographics or knowingly fraudulent in his presentation of them – exposing himself to problems with the fraud squad.

But what a pity those inflated statistics are false! If they weren’t, the Reporter would have a much greater circulation and our shareholders would be better off. As it stands, with a readership of over 30,000, we’re getting to about 70% of anglophone residents. Not bad!.    

Mike Meade

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