Pat Dollard

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Times Online:

A howl of rage is expected tomorrow from French taxi drivers, shopkeepers, civil servants and other protected sectors when President Sarkozy receives a revolutionary plan for recasting the face of France.

The scheme, which Mr Sarkozy has promised to enact, would abolish the jungle of regulations that ensure the comfort of trades and professions but stifle the economy. It would also mean opening the frontiers to immigration, building ten large new cities and scrapping France’s 200-year-old départements, or counties.

The “300 decisions for changing France” have been devised by a team of 40 experts headed by Jacques Attali, 64, an economist writer who served in the 1980s as ideas man to François Mitterrand, the late Socialist President. Mr Sarkozy gave Mr Attali a mission after his election last May to find a way to “unleash the economic growth that France is lacking”. Mr Attali, whose high-spending ways forced his resignation 15 years ago as head of the London-based European Bank of Reconstruction and Development, promises that his package will add 1 per cent to annual growth. It will also cut unemployment by more than three points if enacted over the next year, he says.

The reforms are urgent because “France remains very largely a society of connivance and privileges”, Mr Attali says, in a leaked draft of the report.

Some of the 300 ideas follow paths that Mr Sarkozy has already trod in his attempt to lift the anticompetitive burdens that drag on prosperity. These include a revolution in higher education, cutting labour charges and loosening the job protection that feeds unemployment.

Others are so counter to cherished Gallic tradition that many doubt that Mr Sarkozy will fulfil his pledge to Mr Attali: “What you propose, I shall carry out.” Teachers, a group devoted to regular strikes, are aghast at the idea that their performance should be rated by their pupils.

The Attali group proposes the unheard-of idea of letting retailers and traders sell what they want, where and when they want. At present shops are not allowed to sell at a loss except during twice-yearly sales. Retailers are not allowed to negotiate prices with suppliers and Sunday opening remains a rare exception. Few new hy-permarkets have been authorised anywhere in France for the past decade.

The country’s chronic shortage of taxis would be solved by the abolition of tight quotas and the authorisation of minicabs, a scheme denounced yesterday by the National Taxi Owners’ Federation as outright aggression. Hairdressers would also be freed from their protective quotas, as would veterinary surgeons and the legal profession. All are preparing a ferocious riposte to the ideas, 20 of which have been highlighted for urgent action.

The Socialist and far-right opposition have already denounced the scheme as blatant Anglo-Saxon capitalism. “There is not a single word on salaries,” Benoît Hamon, a Socialist MEP, said. “They want to boost the economy but they’re not doing anything for French people’s wallets.”

Marine Le Pen, deputy chief of the far-right National Front, said that Mr Attali should be renamed Attila because “this is a precise and organised plan for ensuring the death of the French nation as we know it”.

Mr Attali has also come under attack from Mr Sarkozy’s own side. Some MPs are suspicious of the intellectual about whom Mitterrand used to say: “I don’t need a computer; I’ve got Attali.”

As the plan was leaked this week members of Mr Sarkozy’s Cabinet began disowning aspects. Roselyne Bachelot, the Health Minister, told pharmacists that there was no chance that they would lose the chemists’ shop monopoly over the sale of nonprescription medicines. “They’re not going to sell medicines between a tin of peas and a can of carrots,” she said. Les pharmacies remain the only place where you can buy painkillers or vitamin pills.

Civil Service unions – already due to strike this week against other reforms – are expected to take a dim view of proposals for the rapid shrinking of ministries, a sharp drop in public spending and the creation of British-style public service agencies. Resistance is already growing against the proposal – made twice previously in the past two decades, to scrap the 100 départements through which France has been administered since its 18th-century Revolution. To simplify the multiple layers of government, Mr Attali suggests running the country through its 26 regions and much-simplified urban councils. The Pas-de-Calais has already started its fight, refusing to obey an existing reform that will end the registration of vehicles with département number plates.

The opposition and academics are preparing to fight Mr Attali’s call for France to scrap its law banning the collection of ethnic data. These are needed to ensure diversity, his report argues.

Less controversial will be his demand for ultrafast internet access for the whole population, the spending of billions on new high-technology towns and the expansion of the Paris Charles de Gaulle airport to make it the airline hub of Europe.