Down with Europhile Internationalism

Fraser Myers brings it to our attention in the Spiked site.

What is supposed to be happening in Great Britain is really happening in France. Whereas the conventional wisdom would see the people of France embracing the reforms proposed by their liberal internationalist president, they are not. Whereas the conventional wisdom would see the people of Great Britain would be rising up to overthrow their Trumpian prime minister, they are not.

The yellow vest protests were incited by a Macron environmentalist initiative. The president proposed an increase in the gas tax. You know about carbon taxes. Every good climate change activist, from Tom Friedman on up, wants to increase the gas tax. To save the planet at the expense of human beings.

The more recent strikes, which have shut down transportation for days, were called to protest the government’s pension reforms. It did make its own kind of sense. The French government has in the past negotiated pensions that reward indolence. In consequence, the nation is going broke. And yet, those affected are none too happy.

Myers explains:

Thanks to social media, footage of the gilets jaunes protesters – and in particular of the violent beatings they have endured at the hands of the French police – has been spreading around the world for the past year. The British public – so often smeared as insular and parochial – wants to know what has been happening in France, though many feel that the media is not giving this crisis the attention it deserves.

It’s a similar story with the ongoing strikes against Emmanuel Macron’s pensions reforms. The strikes began on 5 December last year, when more than 800,000 people marched across the country against a new ‘streamlined’ pension system. The ‘modern’ and ‘simplified’ system proposed by Macron’s government would, conveniently, erase the benefits and arrangements that have arisen from decades of industrial disputes, to replace it with a smaller one-size-fits-all package.

Then Myers arrives at the salient point. The French protests confound those who live within the Europhile narrative that the media has been propounding nonstop for years now:

The problem with the French strikes and the yellow-vest movement is that they disrupt the prevailing narrative. Britain, Italy, Hungary and Poland are supposed to be the wayward European countries which have fallen to the dreaded populism. France, on the other hand, is run by a liberal centrist Europhile – the kind of person the media class would like to have running Britain (ideally from inside the EU). The fact that the French people are rising up in their hundreds of thousands against the media class’s preferred mode of government is not something that is ever seriously reckoned with. 

Point well taken.