Good point re: facts versus story.
One problem may be that the UK is very London-centric in a way that is markably different from France being Paris-centric.
Just my perception (and I know London much better than Paris) is that in France, if you are not in Paris you are seen as "living in the 'province'", but politicians still fight for farmers there etc. In contrast, in the UK, on the surface there is the appearance that yes, London is the capital and more important, but that people are trying to do initiatives like moving part of the BBC to Glasgow and Manchester - to decentralize a bit.
Yet the wealth concentrated in Greater London and its commutable satellites - as contrasted with the rest of the country - is many orders of magnitude bigger, also due to the financial industry there.
If you live in Knightsbridge and commute to your trader job in Canary Wharf you will never see how derelict Portsmouth or Blackpool really are (the only time I went to Portsmouth, I recall some people sitting in the street with nothing to do).
Fun UK fact. only
>One in five civil servants are based in London (20.1%), down from 20.7% in 2022.
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/civil-service-stati...
True, but "civil servant" is a very broad term. A majority of civil servants - a very large majority outside of London - work in Operational Delivery. They work in JobCentres or prisons, they do clerical work in the DVLA or the Passport Office, but they have no actual involvement in or influence over policy. The centre of power is still overwhelmingly in London.
You can walk out of Canary Wharf, within a mile or two you'll see much the same.
Not that the Knightsbridge set ever do.
Heck, even from Knightsbridge itself you don't have to go that far. North End Road is what, two, three miles?
I don't know of anywhere in London that has quite the profound sense of hopelessness you find in Blackpool, but a lot of it's really not great.
Meh. As someone who's in the opposite situation (familiar with France and not with the UK), I get the feeling that what you're saying applies here, too.
It's funny you should talk about farmers. Yes, politicians say they'll move mountains for them. Yet, in practice, farmers are still barely making ends meet. And we also have the EU on top, which is run by bureaucrats even more removed from the actual "bas peuple". Just look at the whole situation with the Mercosur treaty.
Politicians keep yapping about how ICE cars are the devil and should be banned. After all, you can take a bike or ride the metro, right? It's not like anybody lives outside Paris or its close "satellites". It's very easy when you don't even have an idea how much a ticket costs, since you're carted around by police escort on the people's dime.
We've also had a push for "decentralization", with all kinds of hilariously bad results.
I don't know about Portsmouth nor Blackpool, but I ride around France a fair bit, and outside the biggest cities, many small towns have empty, run-down centers, with mayors fighting to get stores and whatnot back. But people simply move out for lack of jobs.