Thing is, I’m currently in France, a country that wasn’t a paragon of laisser-faire even before my friend François took over. And then – oh là là.
To be fair to François, it wasn’t he who introduced the economically ruinous 35-hour work week. That happened back in 2000 courtesy of another socialist, then prime minister Lionel Jospin.
But François has more power than Lionel did, so he can tighten the screws even tighter. That’s what socialists do, tighten the screws.
Socialism isn’t about more power to the workers, more compassion and less oppression for everybody, equality, public ownership, social care. These are its slogans, not its essence.
Its essence, its guiding principle, is all about the state getting bigger and more powerful at the expense of the individual getting smaller and less powerful. C’est, as they say in these parts, tout.
Acting in that spirit, François took a long hard look at the 35-hour-week and decided it didn’t go far enough. Most employed, and all self-employed, people in France disagree with him, but what do they know, ces cons.
One of the people François no doubt regards as stupid is the nice woman Dorine who owns the hairdresser’s shop in our village. She does the women and her sole employee, another nice girl Amélie, does the men.
Their workload goes up and down, and in the run-up to Christmas it hits the ceiling. Naturally, Dorine wants Amélie to work longer hours, and Amélie definitely doesn’t mind the extra money. But the government won’t hear of it: never mind what the two women want. L’état says no more than 35 hours a week, so 35 hours a week it’ll be.
Fair, or rather unfair, enough. But not all employees wield combs and scissors. Some use e-mails and smartphones, and those bloody things can be used to get around the law. You see, a person doesn’t have to be physically present in an office to get an e-mail.
He may be at home, jammies-clad, un verre de rouge in hand. Suddenly an e-mail comes in, screaming, “Jacques, where the hell did you put the client’s brief, you stupid espèce de merde?” It may take Jacques a minute to reply or, if that verre de rouge isn’t his first, 10.
But that doesn’t matter: numbers don’t affect the principle. A chap may steal £100 or £100,000, but the law says he’s a thief in either case. So any way you look at it, both Jacques and his employer have broken this vital labour law. This, as far as François is concerned, has to stop.
Acting in that spirit, his government has just passed a law making it illegal for people to have their work computers and other such gadgets switched on in the after hours. I’m not sure how compliance will be monitored, or lack of it punished, but socialists can be relied upon to find a way. I’m sure they’ll eventually criminalise even thinking about work in the evening, and I can just imagine the futuristic sensors they’ll use.
This puts me in a precarious position while I’m in France. True enough, I’m not employed by anyone other than myself. But all that may mean – I’m guessing here – that I lead a schizophrenic existence: one half of me is the employer, the other the employee.
It’s as if I heard a commanding voice in one half of my head, telling the other half to write the reactionary stuff I like to write. So it’s possible that François’s mates may decide that the new law covers me along with all other EU citizens.
(After 1992 we aren’t British subjects anymore, and if you don’t believe me re-read the text of the Maastricht Treaty. How long before the French law extends to us, through the EU’s good offices? The average Brit currently overshoots the French diktat by 7.5 hours, which would criminalise the whole country.)
So what happens when I write something that, say, my favourite publication PinkNews finds objectionable? If experience is anything to go by, I get thousands of e-mails pitched at the refined intellectual level of ‘Eat s*** and die, you f***ing c***’.
Being by nature an inquisitive sort, I tend to open e-mails as they come and, I’m man enough to admit this, sometimes they arrive after six o’clock. Does this mean I break the new law every time I open yet another dietary suggestion?
Another thing: I seldom work more than the mandated 35 hours a week but, being self-employed, I take the liberty of deciding when I do so. For example, as I knew I wouldn’t have time to do much work today, I wrote this at 6.30 pm last night, and I received an e-mail from my publisher as I was writing.
Does this make me a law-breaker? I don’t know, but it’s possible. With socialists, anything is.
And out of interest, how is my friend François going to enforce the electronic law? I’m not a technological sophisticate, but the word ‘hacking’ springs to my mind as naturally as the above-mentioned culinary recipe springs to PinkNews readers’.
That’s how it should be: individual privacy – for that matter, anything individual – is nothing, compared to François’s socialist imperative to put his foot down.
Perhaps if Rebekah Brooks beats the hacking rap in Blighty, she can get a lucrative job in François’s government. Meanwhile, I’ll be opening my evening e-mails with bated breath.