The French reconnection: Macron in Britain

0:02The Economist

0:10Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. I'm Jason Palmer. And I'm Rosie Bloor. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the event shaping your world.

0:25What happens when Latin American states and companies pull out of mining operations just at the time that cocaine smuggling becomes less profitable? You get gangs moving from the drug trade into mining and bringing violence with them. And the calm, soporific sound of the shipping forecast is almost like a prayer to many Britons, not least because most of us don't understand it. Our correspondent explains its enduring allure.

1:01But first...

1:11At Windsor Castle in Britain, preparations have been underway for days. The royals do pomp and circumstance extremely well. And today, the groomed horses and polished carriages will greet France's president, Emmanuel Macron, and his wife, Brigitte, who are starting a three-day state visit. But it's not just a cart-and-pony show. Mr Macron will also be meeting with Prime Minister Keir Starmer, where the biggest order of business will be defence and security. Since the Brexit vote in 2016, cross-channel ties have been really difficult, sometimes almost glacial. Sophie Petter is our Paris bureau chief and this morning she's also in Windsor I think the British have often felt that the French were out to punish them for leaving the European Union and the French were annoyed that Britain had indeed done that and it felt like a weakening of their project that they believe very strongly in so this trip really is an important one to seal what has been a very recent rapprochement between the two countries well how did we get this far how did things move from frosty to friendly i think a couple of events have helped one of them was the arrival of kirsten in downing street he and emmanuel macron are very different i mean they couldn't be more different in style but they share the fact that at home they're facing a lot of domestic political trouble and i think that they have shown that they've been able to work together very well, particularly on foreign affairs and on leadership in terms of Ukraine.

2:48The other event was the return of Donald Trump to the White House. And that has, in a way, aligned the two countries more than they've been for a very long time. If you think of traditional foreign policy, Britain has often looked towards America across the Atlantic, and France has always looked towards Europe. Donald Trump has, in many ways, aligned those two countries more than they've been for a long time. I spoke to Peter Ricketts, who was a former ambassador to Paris, who said that in his view, the Franco-British relationship was the best it's been for a decade, at least since Brexit. So what exactly is on the docket for this visit?

3:25Well, today is very much the royal day. The Macron couple arrive at the airport and they're taken straight to Windsor Castle by Prince William and Princess Catherine. And then they are going to have a procession around Windsor. It's really full pageantry, carriages and Windsor at all its splendour. The rest of the summit is a lot more political. There's going to be a summit between the two governments. There's going to be a moment to discuss strategic affairs, particularly with regard to Ukraine at a military base North of London, Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, will be joining by video link.

4:04And as a cultural element tomorrow, Macron visits the British Museum. He goes to Imperial College to discuss innovation. So a real mix, I think, across the spectrum of bilateral relations. And it will, in the end, I think, be remembered probably mostly for the defence and security issues that they will be discussing on Thursday. The issues on which they are in recent times very aligned, I guess. Well, again, it's interesting and it's partly the result of Donald Trump's disengagement from Europe. You've seen a sort of joint leadership by Starmer, the British Prime Minister and Macron, the French president, on trying to put together a coalition reassurance force for Ukraine.

4:42Obviously, that hasn't come to much yet because it relies on a ceasefire, but it's a very interesting and quite new development. They're going to have a further meeting on Thursday. Obviously, Britain and France can't do everything together. They can't even do that much together. They need Germany. They need Poland. They need other European partners and non-European partners. But France and Britain remain nonetheless the two only nuclear armed powers on the continent. They are the only permanent members of the UN Security Council. And that does give them a certain legitimacy in taking the lead on these sorts of issues.

5:14So I think we will see some updating perhaps of the Lancaster House defence treaty between the two countries, which is 15 years old now. and probably some more joint projects to improve Arctic security, Baltic security, and possibly even discuss further nuclear cooperation between the two countries. Any possible sticking points? These are a couple of countries with some long-standing disagreements. Oh boy, that's certainly the case, and we will see those. I mean, obviously they range from things like trade policy, industrial rivalry, there's plenty of differences between Britain and France. There always have been.

5:48probably the most pressing one that is very much part of the British political debate but not the French debate is the question of small boat crossings. I mean that's something that the British get periodically quite upset about the fact that there are so many crossings. This year there was a record number in the first six months from the northern shores of France over to the UK and there is a feeling on the British side that the French police don't do enough to stop these crossings, despite the fact that they are partly funded by British taxpayers. So that is always a sticking point. There is an effort to try and improve police tactics in the shallow waters in France.

6:23So we'll probably see a little bit of movement on that. But there always will be rivalries and there always will be differences between Britain and France. That goes without saying. But all told, this is towards the positive. We expect them to be closer at the end of this than further away. I think so. I think that that's the way that the relationship is going. It really does look stronger than it has done for many years. I've been watching this relationship closely. It has reached some pretty poor low points in the past. Things are a lot better. The countries are more closely aligned. And I think that we will see a strengthening of that on the back of this three-day visit.

6:59Sophie, thanks as ever for joining us. You're very welcome. It's always a pleasure, Jason.

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8:05In Peru, mining can be a deadly job.

8:11In the past three years, dozens of workers have died in a wave of violence linked to illegal gold mining. In Pataz, a region in Peru's Andean hinterlands, since October, two mass graves have been discovered. In Pataz, there's been a lot of violence in the last few months, and it all goes back to a COVID-19 pandemic. Fraser McIlwraith is a news editor at The Economist. It's been gold mining in Pataz for several decades. It's been a big part of the local economy there. But what happened a few years ago was that the state pulled back from the region, lots of mines shut, and gold robbers moved into the tunnels and started to take control of them.

8:55And one of the things they did was that they brought with them security guards, and a lot of those were hired gangsters from Trujillo, which is a tough city on Peru's coast. Very soon after this happened, the gangs basically ended up taking over. And that situation in Pataz is being replicated elsewhere in Peru and the region, is that right? There are lots and lots of cases of this kind of thing happening. There's a pretty broad spectrum of criminality that associates with mining in Latin America, but it ranges between gangs moving out into regions that they really shouldn't be working in. So that's maybe protected areas in the Amazon.

9:35You get lots of miners who move in and force indigenous people off their land. That's something that's happened in the Peruvian Amazon. It's also something that's happened a lot in Venezuela and Brazil. But you also get established mines being taken over by gangs. So what we've seen in Pataz is a good example of this, where you've had gangs move into tunnels that are owned by big mining companies. You've also got cases in Colombia, Colombia's biggest gold mine in Buritica, which is controlled by a Chinese company. But the Gulf Cartel, which is the biggest armed group in Colombia, has moved in there over the past few years and stolen about$200 million worth of gold from its tunnels.

10:16And aside from the wrong people reaping the profits from the gold or areas being despoiled, what is the greater problem for Latin America of this illegal gold mining? So there's lots of problems. One of the big reasons why illegal mining has taken off for gangs is that there's been a glut in the cocaine market over the past 10 years. Coca production has doubled since 2010. Wholesale prices have stagnated, and at the same time, the gold price has shot up. Gangs which are worried about the cocaine trade becoming less profitable are trying to make up for losses elsewhere by moving into gold mining.

10:52In Peru, gangs make more money from gold than cocaine. It's the same in Colombia. In Brazil, government released statistics earlier this year which suggests that in 2022, which is the latest year that they've looked at, gangs made more money from gold than cocaine. And the two activities often complement each other. So in the Amazon, if you've got airstrips that serve gold mines and coca farms, then you're able to spread the cost of those investments more broadly. You're also able to launder the proceeds from drug dealing through gold mines. So what this does is it increases the footprint of gangs, it increases their influence and increases their power.

11:28And aside from the rising crime which you talked about, what are the implications or what are the consequences for local populations? First and foremost is the environmental damage. Illegal miners very often raise the Amazon, deforest whole areas. Illegal mining causes a lot of pollution, particularly mercury poisoning. Mercury is a chemical that they use to separate gold from the ore. And a lot of this gets discharged into rivers in the Amazon, which for local communities is disastrous. So how have governments across the region reacted to this? So they've reacted in pretty disappointing ways for the most part.

12:08The government in Peru has generally been fairly ineffective. They imposed a state of emergency in Potass last year because they were so worried about the rise in violence. But it's achieved very little. In other countries, there's much more overt collaboration between the government and mafias and gold mining gangs, and that can often be to do with corruption. So in Venezuela, the Maduro regime directly collaborates with gold mining mafias in the Amazon. And then in countries like Bolivia, you've got a slightly more complicated relationship between the government and illegal gold mining. So you've had legislation introduced which allows small-scale informal cooperatives to work, in theory, within the bounds of the law.

12:57But they very often do things which are contrary to the rules, and often this leads to a lot of environmental damage. And Bolivia is an interesting case because in recent years the government's actually been forced closer to these ragtag groups of miners because of a foreign exchange crisis. The government's unable to get its hands on foreign currency. And so one of the things that it's done is that it's set up a state-owned company that goes directly to these miners and buys gold from them in order to sell onto the central bank to replenish its reserves. The company, it has to be said, denies that it buys any gold that is illegally mined.

13:36But lots of opposition lawmakers have accused it of doing just that. Fraser, given that governments haven't been particularly successful at cracking down on the cocaine trade, how much hope is there of them actually cracking down now on illegal gold mining? Yeah, so it's a pretty hopeless situation, but there are a couple of things that governments could do. The first is rethinking their budgets. So in Peru, even though illegal mining is a much bigger earner for gangs than drug trafficking, the government spends about a quarter as much dealing with illegal mining as it does dealing with narcotics and associated criminal enterprises.

14:13The other thing that governments could do is trying to get formalization right. So one of the big reasons why legal mining is such a problem in South America is that there's a big informal mining sector of small-scale miners who are working on the edges of the law, often without kind of proper protections. And it's very, very easy for gangs to take advantage of them and to extort them or to provide them with protection. So one thing that can be done is to help those miners move into the formal sector, start working for big companies, set up their own companies that abide by the proper regulations.

14:54And that will provide gangs with a reduced footprint in order to be able to take advantage of the region's resources. And if they fail to do that, then the rising gold price means that this problem is just going to get worse. Fraser, thank you so much. Thank you.

15:29For the past hundred years, apart from during the Second World War and some interruptions during the pandemic, the BBC has broadcast the shipping forecast until recently four times a day. And now on Radio 4, the shipping forecast issued by the Met Office on behalf of the Maritime and Coast Guard Agency. With the first bulletin of the day at 48 minutes past midnight, the BBC, in conjunction with the Met Office, the British Weather Forecasting Agency, uses longwave radio to transmit a series of messages across the airwaves. Dominic Ziegler is a senior editor at The Economist. To the untrained ear, the words sound cryptic, but to seafarers, they provide a very familiar, very precise and really reassuring prediction of the weather at sea for the following 24 hours.

16:20There are warnings of gales in Fitzroy, Shannon, Rockall, Mallon and Hebrides.

16:28The shipping forecast is what it says on the tin. It helps ships, vessels out at sea, understand what kind of weather is about to be thrown at them. The forecast is read in a calm, clear voice. That's important because out at sea, you've got waves crashing about or you've got the loud hum of the engines. So you need to be heard above the din.

16:55The announcer reads out the general synopsis. That's the overview of the pressure systems that are hanging over the North Atlantic. Developing low, moving rather quickly eastwards. Expected pharaohs, 999. It's a very concise way to convey wind strength, sea state, the weather, and the visibility. If you listen to it in the abstract, it's almost poetic, a lot of the language. For instance, if there's a low pressure which is dissipating, it's said to be losing its identity. Systematic forecasts really started with a shipwreck in 1859. The Royal Charter was coming back from Australia. It had no clue of the weather.

17:36It was going up through the Irish Sea. The weather changed viciously and rapidly, and the ship was driven ashore. 450 people died. And that was really where Robert Fitzroy comes into the story. For some time, Fitzroy had been lobbying for a more rigorous, systematic system of weather forecasting. Forecast was a word he invented himself. And he'd been scraping through the logbooks of ships that had been out in the ocean. He also took pressure readings from coastal stations around the shores of the British Isles. And together, he produced what he called a synopsis, weather charts, that tried to give a sense of the overall weather systems and how those systems would affect different parts of the coast and of the sea around Britain.

18:25It's striking how little weather forecasts at sea have changed since those mid-Victorian times. There's of course much greater accuracy. There are satellites, weather radars, and there are hugely powerful computer models. What has changed is the means by which vessels at sea get their forecasts. It's much less the case now that they tune in to BBC Radio 4 or 3 Longwave. They listen out much less for that iconic tune, sailing by that soothing waltz with strings and clarinet. Spoken bulletins are increasingly redundant, Redundant, though they're not redundant for low-tech sailors like me. Partly to save money and partly because it is increasingly redundant, the BBC is scaling back its shipping forecast.

19:21Until March 2024, there were four spoken bulletins a day. They've been cut down now to two, with three at weekends. But even if the shipping forecast is less important than it was, I don't think the BBC has any intention of giving it up altogether. Closing the shipping forecast would provoke a national uproar. The critics would argue quite rightly that the shipping forecast is a national treasure.

19:50I think the seas have significance for British people. To some, they were long a conduit to empire, and today they're still the route to a further world. And at times there's been metaphorical gold in the ocean. Fishing, of course. And then later came the oil and gas industry. But there's another strand of Britishness, which is more isolationist. And to the isolationists, the seas around Britain really are a kind of moat defensive around their blessed plot. And I think there's a final reason why the shipping forecasts won't be shut down altogether. Just as that tune, Sailing By, is a signal for Marys to know that they've got the right radio station to listen to the forecast at 12 minutes to one o 'clock in the morning.

20:31So the lullaby waltz is balm to insomniacs on land.

20:50That's all for this episode of The Intelligence. We'll see you back here tomorrow.

21:02Thank you.