The 1970s are always portrayed as Britain’s dark decade. I’m as guilty of slamming the 70s as anybody else - just take a look at my column in today’s FT. The litany of gloom is familiar: strikes, power-cuts, riots, economic decline.

But the funny thing is that I grew up in 1970s Britain and it didn’t seem so bad. Or rather - the things that look terrible now were quite exciting at the time.

Take the "three-day-week" of early 1974. I was at primary school then and hugely enjoyed the drama every time the lights went out - and my parents started fumbling around for candles and matches. Even some adults enjoyed the situation. I recently met a British diplomat who said that he and his Foreign Office colleagues liked the power-cuts, because it meant that it was impossible to do any work - leaving them with no option but to go to the pub. (He did not explain how they drank pints in the dark.)

Even the occasional riots were fun.

(more…)

The election of Nicolas Sarkozy as the next president of France was greeted with a light smattering of riots across the country. Mr Sarkozy knows that could be just the aperitif. There is a real risk of social unrest, as France’s new president tries to deliver on his promise of “rupture” with the past.

Mr Sarkozy knows that three prime ministers of the Chirac era – Alain Juppé, Jean-Pierre Raffarin and Dominique de Villepin – were forced to abandon economic reforms in the face of popular demonstrations. But he is determined that things will be different this time. One member of the Sarkozy inner circle argues that previous rounds of reform failed because President Jacques Chirac lost his nerve. With “Nicolas” in the Élysée palace, things will be different.

The new president will certainly need nerves of steel because the reforms he hopes to push through in his first 100 days in office could almost be designed to antagonise every strike-happy interest group in the country.

The rest of Gideon’s weekly FT column is here (FT.com subscription required). You can comment below.

We are all familiar with the clichés about American insularity: the number of Congressmen who don’t have a passport, the number of Americans who have never left the US – and so on.

But, as I come to the end of a week in Washington, my overwhelming impression is how incredibly outward-looking intellectual life is in this city compared with London – despite the fact that London flatters itself that it is now the world’s most international city.

On Monday I went to a speaker-meeting at the New American Foundation – one of the plethora of DC-based think tanks, dealing with world affairs. The subject was the future of Pakistan and the speaker was a prominent Pakistani journalist. The room was packed. By contrast, I remember going to a speaker-meeting in London about a year ago with a much more obviously star-studded cast – Bill Kristol, a key neoconservative thinker; Tariq Ramadan, a central figure in the debate about Europe and Islam; and Phil Gordon, one of the leading experts on US foreign policy at the Brookings Institution. The meeting attracted maybe 30 people. You could get more people than that to turn up and listen to the deputy head of the OSCE, in Washington. (more…)

Tony Blair’s script for his last few months in office is becoming clearer. He is planning to use the G8 summit in July as a last hurrah. In the ideal world, he will leave office as a hero - having persuaded the United States to sign up to a new accord on global warming.

A global-warming deal would be sweet for Blair for a number of reasons. First, it would win him back credit with all the lefties who have despised him ever since the Iraq war. Second, it would demonstrate that he does indeed have clout with the United States. All the critics who have derided Blair as a deluded poodle, who has got nothing for his fealty to George Bush, would have to eat their words. Tony has delivered the Americans and saved the planet. Thank you and goodnight.

Blair is obviously too cautious to put it quite like that. But he is definitely sounding hopeful. In an interview this week, he insisted that there has been a "change of mood on climate change" in the United States.

There is some evidence for this. There are numerous bills on climate change pending before Congress. And even the Bush administration is going on the offensive, to persuade the world that it does take the issue seriously.

(more…)