Froggy's in a right old bait - music to my ears!

I must say, there’s nothing more guaranteed to cheer a chap up than the sight of les rosbifs and the Frogs at each other’s throats. It just feels so right – as if the natural order has been restored, everyone’s behaving as they’re meant to, and all’s well with the world.

I know that the “let’s pretend we’re all mates” world of international relations and treaties and diplomacy and pious liberal platitudes is necessary to keep the show on the road – but by God it’s fun when the veneer cracks and basic hard-wired animosity blazes through (especially when you know it isn’t going to result in violence of any sort). Let’s face it, Britain gets right up France’s nose, and vice-versa – always has done, always will – and it’s such a relief when it all spews out into the open, especially over an issue where France is so screamingly, absolutely and undeniably in the wrong.

Another bonus is that Sarkozy is such a silly, pompous, prickly, self-regarding, rude, comical little tit of a Frog: watching his miserable little face as he tottered on his platform heels at a press conference platform next to his boss, Chancellor Merkel, ahead of last week’s treaty debacle was undoubtedly one of the televisual treats of 2011 (“it’s not like we’re brothers or anything” was another). And it’s pleasing to reflect that Sarko and his hippy-chick bride will be turfed out of office next year and that the Old Enemy will probably be saddling itself with a socialist president at exactly the moment when free-market boldness and public sector austerity are the only answers.

Don’t get me wrong – I don’t dislike France or the French (well, not excessively). I’ve loved Paris ever since multiple visits during my schooldays. Wandering all night around the the city with a chum after we’d been locked out of our hotel was one the most exciting experience of my fifteen-year old life to that point (well, to this point as well, actually). Gauloises, red wine, the smell of fresh-baked bread, prostitutes, pin-ball machines, gangsters, caped gendarmes – it was so gloriously, filmically French!

That’s what we love about countries and cities and races – the things that make them uniquely, uncopiably what they are. Every country is what it is, and not another country!

That’s why, over the past four decades, I’ve been so annoyed by Britain’s pro-European left-liberal media-political class endlessly pumping out propaganda designed to convince us that this country’s narrow-minded, mistrustful, xenophobic attitude to our more stylish, sexually relaxed, dirigiste neighbours had left us trailing in France’s wake on every front (apart from pop music – we’ll always have pop music). The message has always been clear – we must become more like the French, or perish!

Among some truths (the French really are better dressers) our media were, of course, peddling mainly lies:

• The French are less racist and more welcoming towards immigrants, who  therefore integrate more easily into French society
• Unlike Britain, where Mrs Thatcher deliberately destroyed our manufacturing base, France still has a successful car industry
• They don’t get into a moral sweat-panic when their politicians are caught having extra-marital affairs – in fact, they don’t even bother reporting it
• Their film industry is a success because their government pumps in public money
• They’re richer than us because the government exercises more control over their economy and they’re more protectionist
• They’ve managed to retain all the Spanish customs - relaxed attitude to tax matters, early retirement, huge civil service, knocking off at 3pm every day - that we were forced to give up by Mrs T, and it hasn’t harmed them at all!
• They take intellectuals - and culture in general - more seriously
• They show proud independence by refusing to kowtow to the Yanks

 Their enlightened attitudes to race have been well and truly exposed as a myth: they have appalling racial problems - the banlieues are straight out of Dante. 

They only have a car industry because Germany and Britain pay for it via our EU contributions, and it’s illegally ring-fenced – ditto farming. 

I know I’m a prudish Lutheran-Presbyterian at heart, but if a relaxed attitude to politicians’ sex lives means you end up with the prospect of someone as sordid as Dominique Strauss-Kahn seriously being considered as a presidential candidate – forget it. They take intellectuals more seriously – but, as a result, you get a bunch of super-pseuds producing unchallenged streams of pompous, pretentious, meaningless twaddle.

Their determination to maintain Spanish customs has come back to bite their scrawny little derrières – and they are not richer than us, and are likely to become a lot poorer, thanks to their attempts to control the economy centrally.

Yes, they’ve certainly enjoyed being rude to America over the years (the French don’t really do gratitude, do they?) – but they’ll happily bend over the nearest desk for any passing German politician who fancies a quickie.

They make better films, on the whole – but that’s nothing to do with funding: it’s just that their film-makers seem more interested in making stuff audiences want to see rather than dreary, self-loathing, socialistic, agit-prop claptrap (although they churn out quite a lof of that as well).

But that’s all fine – and it only matters if you’re a liberal, because, for some odd reason, liberals are convinced that Britain needs to change to become more like other countries. Why? The British are different from the French, and that is simply splendid. I can see why we might like Saudi Arabia to become more like France, given that a woman there has just been beheaded for witchcraft. But why should Britain, whose institutions, customs and habits have evolved over centuries to suit the character of it’s people be expected to alter them? You cannot be small and petite and stylish and big and beefy and scruffily dressed at the same time.

Why are liberals so panicked by different races behaving differently? Where does the desire to obliterate national differences – the very flavour of a country and its people – stem from? Self-hatred? Lack of confidence? Irritation that the electors won’t vote in a sufficiently left-wing government? The memory of carefree, sun-drenched holidays sipping wine in the Languedoc?

(Multiculturalism is, of course, the liberals other weapon of choice – if you can’t persuade a country to willingly destroy its own unified culture, you invite in hordes of immigrants and sit back contentedly while they do the job for you.)

I’m a fan of variety and difference: I like France being France, and I love Britain being Britain. The more we’re at each other’s throats, the more chance it’ll stay that way.

Carry on whining, Francois – it's music to a pluralist's ears!