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'The bitter fruit of government policy'

Telegraph | News | 'The bitter fruit of government policy'

By Jack Lang
(Filed: 06/11/2005)

Some people have been comparing these riots to those of 1968, but they are phenomena from two very different eras. I am not surprised by the explosion of violence in these suburbs - I have been warning it would happen.

The interior minister, Nicholas Sarkozy, wants to play the hardman with his use of insulting language to describe the young people in the banlieus - while for three and a half years, Jacques Chirac's government has broken its social, human and cultural links with the people of these areas.

Teaching posts have been dispensed with, as have local beat police officers. Public funding for schools and cultural, sporting and social associations has also been cut. All this has helped to turn these areas into ghettos. It is an explosive cocktail. On one hand, repression and provocation, on the other a loss of services and the consequent loss of human dignity and hope. The violence we are seeing is the bitter fruit of government policy. I don't say the Left is perfect but we did make efforts, however inadequate, to improve things.

Of course, the problems of the banlieus go back far further. Once built to house middle managers and the upwardly mobile, they have slowly degenerated. But the government is paying the price for having played on crime to win votes. It is an unhappy symptom of political and moral crisis.

Today France is like two countries: one rich and one poor. This is not acceptable when we talk of the values of liberté, egalité and fraternité.

The first immigrants arriving in France accepted inequalities, because they were not born here and because things were often better than where they came from.

The second and third generation immigrants have been born in France and have signed up to the principles of the Republic. They can see they are not treated equally, which is shocking. They don't accept the discrimination.

The people in these banlieus feel like second-class citizens, and until now the attitude of politicians, Left and Right, has been to throw them a few crumbs.

It won't be easy to calm things down. It will be difficult to rebuild the trust of people in these areas unless we offer them something concrete to improve their lives. There need to be fewer good words and more action.
# Jack Lang, the socialist French MP and former minister of culture, was talking to Kim Willsher

November 6, 2005 at 01:56 AM in Europe | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home