A while back I posted an excerpt from an essay by George Orwell about Hitler that, for me, was a perfect piece of political commentary. It was concise, sharp and witty even though it was written during the Second World War. Today, I have stumbled across a piece of political writing that has all the opposite characteristics. In an op-ed on the G8 Conrad Black – the press magnate, peer and former convict – abuses almost all the major economies. But he saves his nastiest paragraph for France:
Among the traditional Great Powers, the grand prize for purblindness goes to the inimitable French, who have elected an unmitigated cipher as president on a platform of sharply higher taxes, bigger deficits, indiscriminate pump-priming, and further concessions to the solid majority of public-sector employees and welfare recipients. A new page will be turned in flogging those who earn the money, and pouring largesse on the unproductive, regardless of merit. Never in its history, apart from the capture of the mountebank Emperor Napoleon III at Sedan by Bismarck’s armies, and when the Third Republic voted itself out of existence at the Vichy casino in 1940 under the jackboots of the returning German army, has France committed such an act of self-emasculation.
Come now Conrad, why be so coy?
