Convenience Big Store: The world is becoming more French

1 September, 2021

In the headlines

Britain is holding face-to-face talks with Taliban chiefs in Qatar about how to rescue as many as 9,000 Afghans – it's "the final staggering twist", says the Daily Mail. Defence Secretary Ben Wallace called the desperate effort to contact the 300 most vulnerable on the phone "Dunkirk by WhatsApp". The killing of Geronimo with a bolt gun yesterday was supervised by four government officials and 25 policemen in chaotic scenes – "How many coppers does it take to help kill an alpaca?" asks the Daily Star. Men who mumble are more attractive to the opposite sex, according to new research – but men prefer women who enunciate clearly.

Comment of the day

An image from Astérix. Film Publicity Archive/United Archives/Getty Images

The world is becoming more French

France, like the little village in the Astérix books, has long been the "stubborn Gallic holdout" against the fashionable neoliberal ideas popular in the West, says Jeremy Cliffe in the New Statesman. While others have embraced the free market, the French have clung to their belief in the big state. As others have embraced Atlanticism, the French have remained firmly Gaullist in keeping their distance – leading former US defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld to dismiss France as "old Europe". Really? While most of Europe was "blindsided" by America's withdrawal from Afghanistan, one capital wasn't so shocked: Paris. Two years ago President Macron labelled Nato "braindead", and in May he began to evacuate France's Afghan employees, "gloomy about the US's ability to orchestrate an orderly withdrawal".

It's not just foreign policy. Nations such as Poland are looking to emulate France's nuclear-heavy, carbon-light energy strategy. Anglo-Saxon penny-pinchers in the UK and US are picking up the French passion for big state infrastructure projects: what is HS2 if not a 40-years-later equivalent of the high-speed TGV rail network? France's 35-hour week looks less outlandish now its neighbours are considering four-day working weeks. And it has a higher GDP per capita than the UK, as well as higher productivity. Yes, France has problems: it's riven by cultural and economic divisions, and its military adventures in Africa "risk becoming its own Afghanistan". But as "old liberal orthodoxies are challenged", the world is changing – and, "whisper it softly, mes amis" – becoming more French.

Trump and Biden aren't so different

Joe Biden and Donald Trump aren't all that different, says Dana Milbank in The Washington Post. During his first nine months in office, the president has pursued "a surprisingly Trumpy agenda". He has completed the rapid withdrawal from Afghanistan that Trump negotiated with the Taliban; maintained punitive tariffs on Chinese goods, despite corporate pressure; and continued coddling Russia by approving Nord Stream 2, a gas pipeline to Germany that circumvents Ukraine. Even on immigration, Biden looks a lot like his predecessor. He's halted construction on the infamous Mexican border wall, but continued Trump's use of a health code, Title 42, "so that, under the guise of preventing the spread of Covid-19, US officials can rapidly remove migrants without allowing them to seek asylum".

Despite these similarities, a whopping 94% of Trump voters disapprove of Biden, according to a new poll from CBS News. "The likely reason for this is obvious, and depressing." Trump fans never cared about his policies. They liked his style – "his attacks on institutions, government-by-tweet, the violent talk and, yes, the white nationalism". If Trump voters cared at all about substance, "they would be swooning for Joe Biden right now".

On the way out

The International Space Station, which is falling apart. Vladimir Solovyov, chief engineer at the space corporation Energia – the Russian equivalent of SpaceX – warns of an impending "avalanche" of broken equipment past its expiry date, after cosmonauts reportedly noticed cracks in the exterior. The ISS was launched in November 1998.

Love etc

Octopuses "throw" shells and silt at one another, and it's often females trying to fend off males that are harassing them, says New Scientist. They grip the projectiles in their tentacles, then shoot a jet of water at them, propelling them several body lengths. A team from the University of Sydney studied footage and spotted a female octopus in her den "throwing" silt 10 times at a male that wanted to mate with her – on two attempts he anticipated the attack and ducked out of the way.

Zeitgeist

Seventy-one per cent of Britons would be supportive if a family member said they were transgender or non-binary, according to a YouGov poll. We're less progressive than Spain (87%), but well above France (47%).

Snapshot

Noted

Several Afghan women gave birth mid-flight during the Kabul evacuation, says Le Point. "Which prompts the question, where are these babies from?" According to the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, the nationality of the child depends on the country in which the aircraft is registered – but only a few dozen nations have ratified it, and France isn't one of them. If the plane is over US soil, you're an American. And airlines sometimes reward those born on board: Virgin granted one baby free flights until the age of 21.

Snapshot answer

It's the tents left behind at Reading Festival after 100,000 revellers decamped from the Berkshire site on Monday. Hundreds of tents were abandoned, along with beer cans, bottles and even broken false teeth. The festival's sustainability manager, Lily Robbins, said: "Tents are one of the worst things to recycle." Environmentalists say synthetic tents left at festivals add 875 tonnes to landfill in the UK each year.