Hong Kong 3. British Education and Parental Bliss gerardroland.substack.com/publish/post...

Hong Kong 1
[...] After a long flight, we landed in Hong Kong’s Kai Tak airport. As soon as we left the plane on the stairs to the tarmac, I felt like I was entering a stove because of the combination of heat and the strong humidity. I thought I would not be able to breathe.

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The current government crisis in France could have been avoided if there had been a constructive vote of confidence. But then, the Barnier government may not have been put in place? Surely, but would that have been really bad? END

As an outside observer, I have always been struck by the fact that French policy-makers and their advisers (be they economists or political scientists) think a lot about policies but too rarely about rules of politics. 8/

Italy did not introduce a constructive vote of confidence. It now has an extreme-right government. While I do not claim nor think there is a direct causal chain from one to the other, one can bet that France is going in the same direction as in Italy. 7/

France will thus likely go through a period of crisis, possibly including new parliamentary elections, which would be very damaging given the bad state of its public finances. A financial rout in France cannot be excluded, signaling the markets' lack of confidence. 6/

After Belgium introduced the constructive vote of confidence in 1994, there were never early elections again. Right now, there is no real alternative government coalition in France. The Barnier government was only put in place thanks to the RN, which pulled the plug yesterday. 5/

In 1982, Helmut Kohl, head of the CDU introduced a constructive vote of confidence, replacing the SPD-FDP (socialist-liberal) government coalition with a CDU-FDP coalition (christian democratic-liberal). 4/

A constructive vote of confidence means that the government can only be voted down if there exists an alternative coalition ready to replace the incumbent government. The advantage is that it is impossible to have protracted political crises. 3/

For decades, Italy and Belgium had short-lived governments and early elections with the rule, not the exception. Then, Belgium introduced the CONSTRUCTIVE vote of confidence, i.e. the system in place in Germany. 2/

The fall of the French government is likely to lead to a protracted crisis. The reason has not much to do with the inability of the French to compromise. It has everything to do with the rules in place. 1/

A POST-WWII CHILDHOOD 2

As a young child, I was terrified by the stories about the Nazis in WWII. I was equally terrified by the possible prospect of a third World War. It seemed that world wars were a recurring apocalypse, each war more horrible than the previous one.
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