Depository for off topic / political posts (NO brexit related posts please)

We are dealing now with the result. The consequence.

It has gone something like, Western leaders have a video call. Who has upset us recently. Saddam someone, Mu’ammar Al-Qadhdhāfi, Bashar al-Assad, Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi.

Let’s bomb the country senseless. ( Take any country throughout the world but with particular emphasis on OIL producing countries in Northern Africa).Why? We need their assets silly.

Let’s set up proxy wars because we have fallen out with the particular despot that we funded lavishly to keep all the migrants in employment, and in their own country.

Let’s now that it has all failed and we have not imposed our democracy and allowed political vacuums and societal destruction where armed infidels filled immediately. They terrorise the population and create migrants. Oh Dear, migrants?

All the war criminal killers who authorised all the attacks and strategies, Bliar, Brown, Straw, Macron, Bush, Obumblar, Trump, Biden etc…Well let’s make them multi multi millionaires. They can have party Jamborees every year. We can call them The Davos meet ups, COP 1 upwards, to 26. Climate Emergency???

What a wonderful idea. Now let’s get back to talking about police on a beach trying to deal with some very poor souls.Perhaps a solution would be get the War Criminals over to the beach, park the GV at Calais, see what total damage they wrought, and sort the fu@@@n mess out.

In the UK black economy the localised stuff goes on too

Of course. French people tell me it is big there too, as is general corruption of officials (which was big in the UK too until recently).

because of insurance requirements

Nobody cares about the workman being insured if the job is half the price and – more importantly nowadays, especially with some trades like electricians – he’s willing to be pragmatic.

but I think there’s also a significant quasi-criminal sector e.g. gangmasters, undocumented migrant labour, etc., where it is principally done because some element of the operation is technically illegal.

My info is that this is difficult nowadays, due to employer requirements for passport checks. It is practically impossible to run a business with say 100 employees and run it out of a suitcase. It was fairly easy 40 years ago when I started in business but not today. I suppose you could run an “underground sweat shop” and reportedly they still exist, employing women who came in from e.g. India and got shoved straight in there, but you would need several layers of protection for the local authority to not find out about it.

In a small business e.g. car washing, illegal workers can work, for a while…

would be quite rapidly deported from France

I don’t see how that’s possible. France can’t just fly an A380 with a load of them and land in Turkey and disembark them, surely? It would start a war. Deportation needs the agreement of the destination country, and you will never get that with refugees because nobody wants them. Well, not unless the country gets a few billion, as was done with Turkey (but didn’t that deal collapse?).

Peter I can not comment on what the French people you know are telling you. But I will comment on my own experiences and tell you what Brits living in this area or with second homes are telling me.
Firstly I do not employ anyone in the black economy.
I live in a small commune where most people will be on a least shaking hands aquaintance (or a.least they were pre covid and that is now beginning to.return). If I need work done I will go.to someone whose work I know or.someone who has been recommended. That person will have either years of experience in working on local buildings and materials and/or will have diplomas showing their work meets the standards necessary (state qualifications not some bit of paper given out by some college that no one has ever heard of). That artisan gives me an estimate which includes everything. If I agree it I will sign that I have read and approved it. That estimate does not change I will get everything.that is on it and I will pay exactly the price mentioned.(this is backed by law)
Any materials or appliances will be supplied by the artisan and will be of.a high quality because if somdthing.fails.within 10 years not only has the artisan got to put it right under guarantee but his reputation might suffer. If he dies or goes of business in the 10 years an insurance will pay to repair the fault.
Any appliances will be supplied at cost price and I will profit from any discounts that the artisan has received from his supplier.
During the work the artisan will clean up after him when he leaves the site. All rubble will be taken away for proper disposal, this will be noted in the estimate. The artisan will be insured against any accidents or damage during the work.
At.the end the job I will get a proper invoice and attestations allowing me to take advantage of any reductions in the VAT rate that the government has put in place for certain types of renovation plus I will be supplied with all the appropriate forms properly filled out except for my signature to take account of any government or regional grants that may be available for the type of work I have had done. This is why I and most French people I know avoid the black economy.
On the other hand many Brits here have suffered at the hands of the black economy. It seems to be ingrained in the Brit mentality that if someone is offering to knock a bit off for cash that they are getting a bargain. Many have found rhat actually they are paying more sometimes much more than an artisan would have charged for the same job. These black economy workers carry no insurance against accident or damage during the work and certainly no guarantee of their workmanship for 10 years. They buy materials and appliances from the local DIY store (made cheap in China as Peter would say) .If anything goes too wrong they will disappear neverbto be seen again. And if what goes wrong, eg they haven’t paid for something, you will be held responsible.Not only will ypu have to pay for that you may well get stuck with any other bills that your employee has run up. If you don’t pay up the supplier could well take the matter to the gendarmes who will definately not be on your side, in fact they might well charge you with employing someone on the black economy and you could receive a heavy fine.
And last but not least if all goes well you will get a hand written scrap of unheaded notepaper as an invoice. It will contain either no SIRET number or a made up one and similar for the VAT.
Does this matter? Well and many Brit second home owners have discovered when they come to selling their house these invoices might be accepted against any capital gain on the property or then again they might not. You might be charged for any outstanding VAT that your employee should have paid. At the end of the day that tidy little profit you thought you had made in buying an old house in France, renovating it on the cheap as you had thought, has actually turned into a huge loss.
And that is why I was so surprised when Graham found on Google that the black economy in France was bigger than that of the UK.

@gallois

Search yourself. Tell me what you find. It’s all a bit random since this stuff is incredibly hard to measure and there will be no peer-reviewed journals, but the consensus seems to be that most European countries, including France, have a larger black economy than the UK. Surprisingly, Scandinavian countries have significant black economies.

After all, we found out about the French fisherman didn’t we? Operating under the radar, no AIS, no written records, catches of non-quota species sold for cash no questions asked. All got a bit difficult when they needed records for Channel Islands permits…

I’m not disagreeing just simply surprised.
I can see that some fishermen selling their catch for cash and not declaring it, although that would be a pretty dodgy thing to do if its your main job and its all your catch. There will be people who will report you to the tax authorities and the authorities do keep a close eye on people not declaring what the authorities think you should be declaring.
On the other hand it would not surprise me if some local farmers cut trees on their land and sold the wood as firewood for an extra bit of cash.
But France is divided into some 36000 communes, those communes receive local taxes and state, departmental and regional funds. And because everyone sees at a local level how they benefit directly from the taxes there is always someone around to make a little call to the tax office if they think someone is not doing the right thing.
And then there is the égalité part of the costitution. If one fisherman discovers he is being undercut by another fisherman because the second is not declaring all their income, believe me that fisherman will be down the town hall or the tax office pretty damn quick.
But it is not unheard of to find stashes of old, very old banknotes tucked under the mattress of somebody who has just died approaching 100 years old. Many such people had a major problem when the Euro came into being.🙂
And even before that with the switch from old to new francs.
So I am not saying there is no black economy just surprised to find it is as rife as you found, based on the stories we hear from local Brits, of how big the black economy is in the UK, especially in the building trade, and the second hand car market and car repair trade.

Silvaire wrote:

The US has not had mandatory military service for almost 50 years (it was in place for 33 years from 1940-1973, created to remove threatening foreign totalitarian regimes of the era)

Is that so? In what way was the North Vietnamese regime threatening to the US? The US lost the Vietnam war, as far as I recall, and we haven’t seen any Vietnamese invasion of the US, have we?

BeechBaby wrote:

Let’s now that it has all failed and we have not imposed our democracy and allowed political vacuums and societal destruction where armed infidels filled immediately. They terrorise the population and create migrants. Oh Dear, migrants?.

You’re right, of course (well mostly), but that doesn’t help in the situation we’re in now.

@Airborne_Again, the US benefits from not being isolated in a totalitarian world. Along those lines, I’d suggest you study the US role in defeating the threat of communism and other totalitarianism in the 20th century, including its role in liberating Europe (as well as Asia) from 1940-1990, versus asking me to explain the obvious benefits to the US in doing so on EuroGA. Like most former communist controlled Europeans, I’m sure most South Koreans are quite happy today to have been on the receiving end in a situation in which the US military did what had to be done in three years versus being hamstrung for a decade by domestic politics (as in Vietnam).

Sweden would be in quite an interesting position now, probably occupied I’d guess, if it were not for 20th century US military interventions and subsequent defense of Europe and its current trade routes, and while the US does only a limited amount of trade, tourism etc today with Sweden specifically, we benefit from a democratic and open Scandinavia just like everybody else.