The Age of Austerity

Disaffected French youth (is there any other kind?) have taken to the streets to protest changes to a pension plan they won't use for 40 years, and budget cuts might send Britain back to the Middle Ages.

There’s trouble brewing for our European cousins, who are being asked by their governments to swallow some unpopular austerity measures in order to alleviate the national debt in the wake of the recession. In France, protests over plans to increase the retirement age from 60 to 62 have led to a series of nation-wide demonstrations that turned violent yesterday, and today Britain announced the country’s severest spending cuts since the Second World War.

Self-confessed anglophile Heather Mallick writes in the Toronto Star that she’s “beyond aghast at what is being done to England.” While comparatively modest reforms in France have caused les peuples to take to les streets in an angry mass, Mallick wonders why there have so far been only modest demonstrations in Britain. The spending cuts drastically reduce the size of the welfare state and eliminate support for the country’s poorest people, and as a result “Britain’s screwed. It always was a peasant nation with a thin veneer of culture” and these cuts have basically removed that veneer. So it’s back to peasants and monarchs for England. Feudalism 2.0.

The National Post’s Kelly McParland takes a pretty healthy run at the quick-to-strike “French protesting class,” which he says holds “a special place in the ranks of international leftwing cabals.” Perhaps because of engrained memories of taking to the barricades during the French Revolution, while “malcontents in other countries struggle to get a good riot going, even for a just cause” the French will riot at the drop of a hat for an unjust cause. In this case, is a piddling two year change in the retirement age. McParland rightly says that the riots probably won’t help matters for anyone, but seems to want to have it both ways when he describes the hooligans responsible as “kids who probably don’t even have jobs yet, and couldn’t give two hoots about retirement.” Either the protestors are leftwing crackpots or apolitical thugs looking for an excuse to torch things, it can’t be both.