A Holloway editor considers French public spending, school money in transit and the British habit of laughing at France while doing exactly the same thing
Wednesday, 21 October 2026. Holloway. Rain on the window, a baguette from the Turkish bakery on the Holloway Road, 1.10pm.
The Most Honest Sentence In European Public Finance
Every so often a government says something so precise that a satirist can simply print it and go home. This week the French Ministry of National Education, according to the report on France’s cobblestone economy and the school money in transit, explained that the money for schools exists and is currently in transit. I have read that sentence perhaps forty times. I intend to have it engraved on my headstone, beneath my name and above the date, which will also be in transit.
The background is real enough. The OECD’s survey put French public spending at fifty-seven point two percent of national output in 2025. Students have been blocking school gates over missing teachers and overloaded timetables. And the overcrowded classroom, which appeared on the grievance list in May 1968, has reappeared on the grievance list in October 2026, making it the only item from 1968 that has never needed repair.
The Committee For The Efficiency Of Efficiency Measures
The section I enjoyed editing most concerns the ministry’s response to the OECD’s advice on spending more efficiently. It forms the Committee for the Efficiency of Efficiency Measures, with eleven members, a secretariat of forty and a subcommittee on lunch. I have sat on academic committees for thirty-seven years and I can confirm that the subcommittee on lunch is the only one that ever reaches a conclusion. Usually the conclusion is sandwiches.
My favourite detail is the working group on classroom heat, which met in July in a room without air conditioning and recommended further study in a cooler month. That is the purest expression of the bureaucratic mind I have ever encountered, and I once worked at a university that formed a task force to find out why the task forces were not finishing.
The Cobblestones Are A Relationship
The historical bit is lovely. Paris paid to lay the paving stones. Then many streets were covered with asphalt in the years after 1968, when people noticed that a cobblestone is, among other things, a very portable argument. Now, according to the piece, there is a third contract in tender to uncover some of them for tourists. One of our comics in the observations box calls this not infrastructure but a relationship: every few years somebody says I need space, then I miss you.
I laughed until I had to put down the baguette. Then I stopped laughing, because I remembered that Islington Council resurfaced the Holloway Road three times in four years, and each time a different utility company dug it up again within a month. Thames Water, then a cable company, then Thames Water again, apparently looking for something they had left the first time. That is not infrastructure either. That is a treasure hunt funded by council tax.
The British Habit Of Laughing At France
This is the bit I always tell my students. The British love a French government story because it allows them to feel organised by comparison. But if you swap Paris for London and the Ministry of Education for any British department you like, the joke still works. The money is in transit. The review will be costed once the review has been costed. The form is available at an office that is currently blockaded. We have all filled in Form 14-B. Some of us are still waiting to hear back.
Where The Money Actually Goes
A lecturer quoted in the piece says the money is not missing, it is very well looked after, so thoroughly that nobody can find it. I would like to recruit her. She has explained the entire Western public sector in two sentences and did so from a lecture hall whose windows do not open, which she correctly described as a data point.
The serious question underneath, which is why I wanted the piece on our network, is the one the OECD itself asks: whether spending more automatically buys better public services. It plainly does not, any more than buying three cars makes a prince less impatient. But spending less does not automatically buy better services either. What buys better services is knowing where the money went. That is the most boring sentence in politics and the most important, which is why nobody ever puts it on a banner.
From The Govna Mailbag
A reader from Leeds wrote to ask why a site about British politics spends so much time on France. I replied that France is Britain’s mirror, held up across the Channel, and that whenever we look at it we see ourselves with better bread and worse queuing. The rest of the answer is on our About page, which explains what this odd little site is for, and which a former student assures me nobody has ever read in full.
Afternoon Plans
I will spend the rest of the day doing what every Holloway resident does in the rain, which is complaining about the bus while standing next to the bus. Tonight I will read de Tocqueville, who visited America and came home to explain France, and who would have understood perfectly that a nation spending fifty-seven percent of everything can still run short of chalk. The chalk, the piece reports, belongs to a different ministry. Of course it does. In Britain it would belong to a quango, and the quango would be under review.