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The UK and France are Europe’s closest relations. They have economies of similar sizes and shapes. They have colonial pasts of a similar hue and geographic spread, though the British empire was the larger. Given this, anyone interested in improving the lot of people in one country would do well to study the successes and mistakes in the other.
British policymakers have much to learn from France, not least its embrace of nuclear power, its first-class healthcare system and its central role in the EU. Given the UK’s biggest social and economic problems, such comparisons are often a source of real and deserved embarrassment. Indeed, one reason why the British political class leapt upon the recent unrest in France is so they could talk about what sometimes feels like a vanishingly small number of areas in which the French have something to learn from the British.
The UK’s integration model and approach to race relations does perform better than the French one. Some of that may be about the benefits of a multicultural model over a more coercive form of secularism or differences in the labour market. But perhaps the most underrated British strength is simply our ability to count. In a country often defined by poor management and inadequate capital investment, the Office for National Statistics really is world-leading. This highly effective organisation produces reliable and consistently good data with comparatively few limitations on what it can ask about.
As a result, British policymakers simply know a lot more about the shape of their country and its social and cultural problems. The benefit goes far beyond race relations. It helped the UK enjoy a rapid rollout of the Covid-19 vaccine and a faster end to lockdown. It also means that we can say, with high certainty, that the children of immigrants in the UK are more likely to be in work than their parents, with the exception of black Caribbean and Indian men. Indeed, some groups, like second generation Bangladeshi men and second generation black African women, have lower unemployment rates than white British men and women respectively.
In France, which like Germany, Japan and a host of other OECD nations does not collect data about race and ethnicity, much more of what we know is based on extrapolation. The headlines are not good for this model: second-generation immigrants in France have a 19 per cent lower standard of living than those not descended from recent immigrants. These compare unfavourably to the overall British statistics, which show a relatively marginal difference between the native population and the foreign-born.
Of course, outcomes among immigrants are also a flawed measure with which to consider a country’s minority population given both the UK and France have well-established non-immigrant minority populations. But we are forced to do so in part because the French state collects no data on minorities.
Some defenders argue that for France, the problem isn’t the policy, it’s the migrants. Put bluntly, they say, the issue is that many are from Africa and many are Muslims. But the type of people coming to both countries since 1945 is not that different: a wide range of migrants from former colonial possessions, working in all kinds of industries. Look at how African migrants to the UK perform better than white Britons across a range of measures or the strong academic performances of Britons from the Indian subcontinent. It’s possible, I suppose, that Algerian Muslims are just harder to integrate than Bangladeshi ones or west Africans from the Gold Coast more able to thrive abroad than west Africans from the Côte d’Ivoire. But it doesn’t seem all that likely.
It seems more likely that UK policymakers are better able to respond to problems because they have better data. For example, the school census determines how much central government funding schools receive per pupil who speaks English as a second or third language. When you don’t have data, policy debates inevitably become driven by anecdote and supposition, as do the levers that governments reach for. It’s thus not surprising that the gap between outcomes in France and the UK is significant: if anything it’s more surprising that it is not larger still.
Narayana Murthy, the Indian billionaire, is fond of the saying that “in God we trust, but everyone else needs to bring data to the table”. It’s a phrase his son-in-law has reached for too. As it happens, this son-in-law, the prime minister Rishi Sunak, is himself good anecdotal evidence of the success of the British model. But the real secret lies in the fact that the UK doesn’t need to reach for anecdote to show its approach to integration is working.
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