In recent weeks, our political class has gleefully taken the French presidential election as a high profile opportunity to bang the drum for the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ economic model. For British commentators, the French malady of high unemployment and general inefficiency can have but one cure: the French must accept that we were right and they were wrong, and take their neo-liberal medicine.

Writing in the Independent, "John Lichfield":http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article2461427.ece describes with some bemusement a Gallic political culture where people “bash Big Capitalism” like “born again Trotskyist[s]”. For Lichfield, what France needs in order to be “modern”, “outward looking” and lots of other jolly-good-sounding things is to adopt what he calls “pragmatism”.

For Lichfield, “pragmatism” is “non-ideological”. It is simply “what works best” – something the French perhaps hadn’t yet thought to try. “Margaret Thatcher made Britain safe for pragmatism”, says Lichfield, whilst her heirs in “pragmatism” are Blair, Cameron and Brown.

Of course, this “pragmatism”, that is to say, “Thatcherism” or “neo-liberalism”, is in every sense an ideology – one of low taxes and low social expenditure that sees the state and/or collective action as inherently inferior to competition between self-interested individuals in a market economy (whether the ideology is taken seriously in practise is a separate question). Also, like any ideology in the modern pejorative sense of the term, faith in its merits tends to be quite resistant to the intrusion of factual evidence.

Is the Anglo-Saxon neoliberal model simply about an apolitical sense of “what works”? That depends on whom you believe the economy should work for. One might believe that the point of a national economy is to increase the welfare or utility of the general population as a whole. If one is a democrat, believing in the equal value of each human life, then an economic model that fails the weakest and most vulnerable can hardly be described as a success.

The results of a recent report allows us to look into precisely this question. In February this year, "UNICEF":http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/13_02_07_nn_unicef.pdf produced a study of child welfare in the industrialised countries. British children were found to be the worst off out of those in twenty one developed economies. After nearly three decades of neoliberalism post-1979, child poverty had doubled. However Britain is deploying its material resources, it cannot be in accordance with “what works best” – at least not for the weakest and most vulnerable in society. One might justifiably view this as a bottom-line economic indicator.

One of the report’s authors, Professor Jonathan Bradshaw of York University, blamed the UK's placing on long term under-investment and a "dog-eat-dog" "society.":http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6359363.stm Describing the findings as “shocking”, Children's Society chief executive Bob Reitemeier said that "Unicef's report is a wake-up call to the fact that, despite being a rich country, the UK is failing children and young people in a number of crucial ways."

By this important measure of economic success – child welfare - France may have only come sixteenth out of twenty one. But it came five places higher than the country whose model the UK commentariat are so keen for it to adopt. In fact, it was Holland, Sweden, Denmark and Finland – the countries operating the so called “Nordic” economic model – that came in first, second, third and fourth.

Nor does Anglo-Saxon pragmatism offer its children much of a way out of poverty, despite New Labour’s stress on "“equality of opportunity”":http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,,802653,00.html as opposed to wealth equality. A 2005 "LSE":http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/pressAndInformationOffice/newsAndEvents/archives/2005/LSE_SuttonTrust_report.htm study into social mobility put the placed the UK and US at the bottom of a selection of industrialised countries, with mobility in the UK declining. Countries using the Nordic model again came out on top. Not only are British children more likely to be poor, but any effort they spend trying to escape poverty is less likely to be rewarded.

In fact, it has been clear for some time that the “Nordic” model of high-taxation and social expenditure – what neo-liberal icon Friedrich von Hayek described as “the road to serfdom” – is consistently "outperforming":http://sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=000AF3D5-6DC9-152E-A9F183414B7F0000 the Anglo-Saxon economies. It enjoys lower poverty rates, higher national income per working age population and "higher employment efficiency.":http://www.bruegel.org/Public/fileDownload.php?target=/Files/media/PDF/Publications/Policy%20Briefs/PB200501_SocialModels.pdf

So should France not, if it wishes to change course, be looking for inspiration to those countries whose economic model outperforms its own and the rest of the industrialised world? Or have the Anglo-Saxon political classes also invented new definitions of “pragmatism” and “what works best” to add to their impressive economic innovations?

Its unlikely that our neoliberal pundits will allow the facts to spoil the mood between now and polling day in France. But perhaps at our next general election, their Scandinavian counterparts will be looking with bemusement at our political culture, and asking themselves when Britain will put aside “ideology”, stop bashing “Big Government” like born again Thatcherites, and accept the sensible pragmatism of “what works best”.