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But now tragically parts of the French capital have been transformed into sprawling, squalid migrant camps.
Many central Parisian streets are lined with rows of filthy tents, put up by young men from Africa and Asia who think that Europe owes them a living.
This mess is a symbol of the deepening immigration disaster inflicted on the continent by treacherous, unpatriotic politicians.
The EU has made a fetish of open borders and multiculturalism. Now in the Paris makeshift settlements we can glimpse the destructive consequences of that ideology.
The squatter camps in the capital have expanded in recent days due partly to the closure of the Jungle in Calais.
But the Jungle in Calais was only allowed to develop in the first place because of the same mix of cowardice, political correctness and lethargy that is enabling the Parisian tents to mushroom.
Instead of showing robustness and determination when the Calais freeloaders first started to arrive, the French authorities were pathetically inert.
As the camp’s population reached more than 10,000, violence became endemic and businesses were destroyed.
We ask you to take your responsibilities and assume your moral duty
Letter to Amber Rudd
Only when the continuing viability of the port was actually threatened did the French government finally act.
Yet what has been so intolerable about this saga has been the instinct of French politicians and pro-immigration groups to blame Britain for the shambles.
The Jungle campers were on French territory and had been waved through to Calais by French officials. Yet somehow, in the mindset of some Gallic buck-passers, it was our fault simply because the migrants had expressed a wish to live in England.
In the aftermath of the camp’s closure French leaders are at it again with claims that Britain must take in 1,500 “unaccompanied minors” who were living at the camp when it was closed.
GETTY
Activists in Paris sent a letter to Amber Rudd stating the UK should assume its moral duty
In a phone call to Theresa May on Saturday President Francois Hollande said that our Government must “play their part in subsequently welcoming these minors to the United Kingdom”.
His demand was echoed by other figures such as Xavier Bertrand, the president of the Calais regional council who argued that “we now need the British Government to implement and accelerate the juvenile transfer process to the UK. It is a question of dignity and humanity”.
From Paris more than 100 Left-wingers sent a pompous letter to Home Secretary Amber Rudd that stated: “We ask you to take your responsibilities and assume your moral duty by immediately organising their arrival.”
All this Gallic emotional blackmail is as offensive as it is absurd. For a start the attempt to tug at our heartstrings will no longer work after the fiasco last week over Britain’s previous acceptance of so-called “unaccompanied minors” from Calais, many of whom turned out to be hulking young men rather than vulnerable children.
The con trick played on the British public by the Calais agencies has permanently discredited the case for more assistance.
Just as importantly, none of this is any business of ours. No matter how many times the phrase “my uncle in Birmingham” is heard, most of these migrants have absolutely no connection with Britain.
If there really have been so many unaccompanied children at the camp then how on earth did they get there and why have the French done nothing about them until now?
It sounds like Gallic negligence on an epic scale. And they have the nerve to lecture us about our supposed “moral duty”.
French politicians are prize hypocrites. They want to focus attention on Britain to distract attention from their own spectacular failings, which have led to profound public disillusion in France with the entire political process.
Instead of berating us President Hollande should put his own house in order. Under his hopeless leadership France has completely lost its way.
Immigration is out of control. Militant Islam is a growing menace. France has become a land of fear and division.
The French political class has treated its own people with contempt, refusing to defend the integrity of the nation or the fabric of society. As the Parisian squatter camps demonstrate, a grasping culture of entitlement now pervades in migrant circles, fomented by the self-serving politicians and media.
It used to be held that the right to claim asylum was based on a genuine fear of persecution or death.
Now the fashionable definition of a refugee is so ridiculously wide that it is applied to anyone “fleeing poverty”.
Given that there are around 1.3billion living in severe poverty around the world that label offers scope for an unrelenting deluge of new arrivals.
It is a flood that will only accelerate under the auspices of the EU, to which French politicians remain absurdly attached despite the damage that Brussels is inflicting with its addiction to mass immigration and its hatred of traditional nationhood.
The founding father of the European project was Frenchman Jean Monnet, as was Jacques Delors, the architect of the European Union.
At least the British public had the sense to vote for freedom through Brexit. The French electorate will never be allowed that chance and so the nightmare of disintegration will only accelerate.
The UK will leave the EU. We will be an independent country, passing our own laws and governing ourselves. We will be a Global Britain, always the most passionate, most consistent ...
Steve Baker is Conservative MP for Wycombe and a co-founder of The Cobden Centre, an educational charity for honest money and social progress.
Steve Baker: The EU would be foolish to sever all financial services ties with the UK (Source: Getty)
The UK will leave the EU. We will be an independent country, passing our own laws and governing ourselves. We will be a Global Britain, always the most passionate, most consistent, most convincing advocate for free trade, promoting peace and prosperity around the world.
We will seek a unique, reciprocal UK-EU arrangement of open trade in goods and services and co-operation on other matters, like counter-terrorism.
In that context, the Legatum Institute’s Special Trade Commission, bringing together over 200 years of experience across hundreds of trade agreements, has become the UK’s leading voice of pragmatic free trade in this transition.
Its Financial Services Briefing, released yesterday, illustrates in authoritative detail a spectrum of viable models for UK financial services trade with the EU.
The UK must be willing to rely on existing third country arrangements with the EU so we can pursue opportunities for better regulation and global growth. Nevertheless, there are strong mutual incentives to agree regulatory equivalence and continued reciprocal market access as a transitional arrangement to a full free trade agreement.
That agreement would have a comprehensive services schedule binding both parties to market access and national treatment subject only to each complying with globally-agreed standards.
Given we will be fully compliant with EU law on exit, the practical barriers are low; the obstacles are political and the pressures on our partners will increase.
Take asset management. There are 94 EU firms with passports into the UK, managing nine per cent of the £5.7 trillion assets under management here.
Meanwhile, 32 UK companies passport to the EU with six per cent of assets held by European investors. There is strong reciprocal interest here. At our exit date, we will be compliant with the UCITS V directive.
While that regulation offers many opportunities for improvement, EU members can allow asset managers to delegate their functions to firms in third countries.
Ireland permits delegation to managers in countries outside the EU, including Japan, Hong Kong, Australia and the USA.
The bottom line is that it would not be feasible for the EU or its members to cut off delegation to the UK, especially against likely objections from Ireland and Luxembourg: operating as a third-country asset manager would be viable.
However, if the UK is deemed equivalent in our withdrawal agreement – the logical consequence of our following EU law until we leave – then there is no reason we cannot continue asset management on the present basis as a transitional measure to a full bilateral free trade agreement.
With limited opportunities for growth in Europe, we must be positioned to turn outward to Asiaand Latin America, where since the crisis assets under management have grown twice as fast as in Europe.
We have a transformational opportunity to pivot towards providing better-regulated UK products to savers and investors in regions with deep and growing capital pools: that must be our strategic goal.
In investment services and market infrastructure, the new “MiFID II” rules will take affect in January 2018, introducing a new regime for authorisation of third-country firms. That provides a pathway to market access in addition to national and WTO rules.
There will be no legal obstacle to the Commission recognising the UK as equivalent under MiFID II and the alternative would be significant market disruption across the EEA.
Through member-state authorisation, third-country agreements and equivalence recognition, viable options exist for deposit takers and insurers too. In every sector, there are strong reciprocal incentives to conclude bilateral arrangements of equivalence as a transition to a modern free-trade agreement.
There is disadvantage to EU firms, for example, in failing to carry forward the preferential risk weightings of assets held in the UK.
The Special Trade Commission has shown that the foundations and incentives are in place for viable transitional arrangements for our financial services firms doing business in the EU.
Once the pragmatism of commercial incentive supplants political grandstanding, we will find we can leave the EU swiftly and successfully into a world of more competitive regulation in which the City flourishes.
Bruce Dear is head of London real estate at law firm Eversheds.
We built Wall Street on Water in the Docklands through an unprecedented package of development incentives (Source: Getty)
London has always risen again.
This is the 350th anniversary of its greatest resurrection. Our ancestors in 1666 reacted to the Great Fire with a speed and coordination that defies belief. They tax-incentivised developers, ran the first national charitable appeal, invented modern fire insurance, and worked day and night for free. Compared with the Great Fire, Brexit is barely a gnat bite. As we deal with it, we should be inspired by their resilient example.
We must fight as hard as they did to renew London's infrastructure and housing. A city that cannot provide homes, healthcare and easy travel for its people is a city that cannot succeed.
As part of Eversheds’ “Illuminating Insights” Museum of London series, we hosted a panel last week with Bill Hughes, head of real assets at Legal & General Investment Management, and John Dickie, head of strategy and policy at London First. We focused on London’s infrastructure and housing challenges, as it strives to remain a pre-eminent global city.
Cyclical housing and infrastructure crises are a perennial part of London’s success, as ever more millions come to live and work here. Infrastructure strain is the growing pain of a thriving city. So we must constantly readdress it. Otherwise, we will not have a functioning global metropolis and, with London paying a third of the UK’s tax, that would be national disaster.
These challenges are always multifaceted and can only be solved by a coordinated public and private sector alliance. When both sectors work together, London has achieved housing and infrastructure feats little short of miraculous. For example, between 1918 and 1939, 860,000 homes were built in Greater London. In 1934, 1,500 suburban London homes were being built every week. Again, between 1945 and 1970, over 450,000 council houses were built in London.
Contrast our pale performance with the turbo-charged achievement of our immediate predecessors. London’s population is currently growing at 100,000 a year. Over the next decade, that’s equivalent to all of Birmingham moving to the capital. We need to build over 50,000 homes a year to house these new Londoners, but we are limping along at around 20,000 new homes a year.
We are failing as house builders. Our grandparents could do it, but we seem incapable or unwilling to match them. What can they teach us about delivering mass housing and infrastructure?
First, they had active local authorities with the power to borrow and raise revenues to build. Between 1969 and 1989, English councils built almost 1.5m homes. Between 1992 and 2012, they built less than 15,000. Throughout most of the twentieth century, local authorities were fundamental to British housing policy. They must become so again, and be empowered to do much more to finance, facilitate and deliver housing and infrastructure.
Second, at least until the early 1960s, there was an active private rented sector (PRS). It was then tarnished by some unscrupulous landlords and extinguished by over-regulation. We need to nurture and professionalise that sector again. Regulatory, tax and investment incentives should be given to encourage the institutions who stand ready to invest. PRS is well-placed to answer the needs of middle market renters; while council and housing association provision helps those in more straitened circumstances. We need to create a renting culture and move away from our national home ownership obsession.
The other lesson here is that regulation kills golden geese. Rent controls (an over-reaction to some bad landlords) pushed private sector landlords and institutions out of the market from the 60s onwards. In 1960, 42 per cent of London homes were privately rented. By 1981, it was only 14 per cent. Result: a mass shortage of flexible smaller scale rooms and flats and, by 1976, 50,000 squatters in London. London needs a government that knows both when to intervene – and when to get out of the way.
Third, our predecessors were prepared to cut through planning and regulatory restrictions. Contrast that with the frenzy of Nimbyism that breaks out now every time there is a major infrastructure decision. The regeneration of Docklands was launched with tax and investment incentives of mind-numbing generosity. The Isle of Dogs became an early Enterprise Zone and the Bank of England relaxed the rule that banking headquarters had to be in the City. The London Docklands Development Corporation was effectively a red-tape-destroying dictatorship for development delivery. This encouraged US and Canadian investors to build 8m square feet at Canary Wharf speculatively, creating London’s “Wall Street on Water”. In the happy days of the 1920s and 30s boom, the modern planning regime did not exist. Without it, they created Metroland – much derided since, but still the best and most enduring solution to London’s housing problem.
Fourth, they were also prepared to borrow to invest in capital infrastructure. We have not been and we must get braver. Although the role of institutional and other patient capital will be vital, prudential public borrowing and bond issues (as part of a full range of funding) have an important role to play. The government must also be willing to share more risk with the private sector. Then it will find the UK institutions willing partners in filling its infrastructure funding gap.
Fifth, our London predecessors were masters of comprehensive combined private and state solutions – multi-tenure and multi-sector. We must recapture that joined-up philosophy. There are hopeful signs that Theresa May’s government is moving away from its predecessors’ more one-track approach (for example, in adopting a multi-tenure housing policy).
Lastly, our grandparents had what HG Wells called “whoosh and go”. They believed in the power of the private and public sectors and in their own ability to solve problems – however severe. London spirit meant constant innovation, confidence and the diverse talents of millions pulling together. We need to rediscover that self-belief.
The next time you see one of those ridiculous tweets saying “Is 2016 the worst year ever?” think of this. During the Blitz, the City lost a third of its pre-war floor space, including 6m square feet of offices, well over 100,000 London houses were destroyed and more than 30,000 Londoners died. Yet they recovered to build a thriving megalopolis open to the world and all its commerce. A city like London can take Brexit and infrastructure strain in its stride and build a new future at the heart of the world’s economy.
