THE GUARDIAN: Cross-party commitment to welfare means France is a good place to be old, young, sick, jobless or female
The future of social care, President Nicolas Sarkozy declared, "is a matter of such importance and gravity that ideology has no place". His opponents scoff, among them Martine Aubry, one of the frontrunners to be the Socialist party's candidate against him in the presidential elections due in 2012.
Viewed from the British side of the Channel, Sarkozy has made a striking promise to create a "new branch of the welfare state" to provide care for old people and those with disabilities. France has 1.1 million dependent old people, their numbers expected to grow by 1%-2% to the middle of the century, when the over‑85s could number 5 million.
Alarmist voices have sounded, but France has heard little of the partisan hysteria audible in Britain, where spending on care for old people has been proportionately higher than in France. Sarkozy promises to lay out a plan by this summer, in good time to give him a populist theme for the presidential campaign. (By then we ought to have sight of proposals to come from Andrew Dilnot, the Oxford economist commissioned by the Cameron government to rethink social care; they will make for a fascinating comparison.)
It's true that Sarkozy, after grandstanding on social care when he was elected in 2007, has vacillated. His latest line is that social care won't be a formal "fifth branch" of the French welfare state. Its four pillars are family benefits, health, coverage for accidents at work, and pensions. They offer relatively generous statutory entitlements, funded by insurance schemes paid for by statutory employer and employee contributions, topped up by general taxation. Instead, Sarkozy's extension of social care is to come from private insurance, some tax funding or even (this came from Laurent Hénart, the president of the national agency for personal services and a pro-Sarkozy MP) the proceeds of French workers giving up a day's leave each year. But the state will organise and underpin it.
How unlike Britain: in France, cross-party commitment to welfare runs deep, as does belief in the necessity and benignity of "l'état". Politicians on the right and the left use the word solidarité with sincerity (the National Front is statist, too, though its definitions exclude "immigrants" from the national compact). Perhaps solidarity is the modern expression of the 1789 cry for "fraternity". The Sarkozy government has a minister for solidarity and maintains the solidarity tax, only one of several payments by general taxpayers and employers levied in the name of strengthening social cohesion. On the annual journée de solidarité employees' pay is earmarked for old people's charities. Continue reading and comment » | Polly Toynbee | Tuesday, March 22, 2011
