Britain 2015
After the Balcombe protesters have all been outed as plain clothes policemen with a taste for hippy girls and boys in beads and handwoven smocks, fracking finally gets underway. All the companies involved are American, using equipment made in Germany by engineering companies which have converted from making nuclear and solar power equipment. The workforce consists of Croatians working for a company based in Sicily which mysteriously manages to undercut everyone else while supposedly paying the minimum wage. (British trade union members are anyway banned from working in carbon intensive industries). The British take their cut by offering rented rooms to the Croatians for two thirds of their wages (a nice little undeclared earner for homeowners with a spare room since Zachary has gone to university). The fracked gas is sold to India in a complex deal which reduces Britain’s carbon footprint, by a company with dozens of recently retired DECC mandarins on the board. The considerable tax revenues from this bonanza are used to provide social security benefits for the unemployed overpriced British workers (including Zachary) and tax cuts for Zachary’s parents whose only source of income is the rent in cash from Borislav.

France 2020
Development of fracking is delayed in France by the need to first overthrow the government and beat 200,000 green protesters into submission. It is run by a state-owned monopoly which has mysteriously survived the European Union ban on state-owned monopolies and which is headed by a coterie of French engineers who all went to the Grande École Supérieure de l’Administration de la Supériorité Française with the President and the Prime Minister and their respective mistresses. The gas is sold to the British (the French don’t need it because of their nuclear industry) and the profits used to buy up the rest of Britain.

What’s the matter with you lot?

I should point out that this is a plea for long-term thinking about the economy, rather than for socialism, but it wouldn’t have made such a good title. And any praise for French politicians is firmly tongue in cheek. If the French manage to make Ariane rockets, Airbus and high speed trains while we’re content with Dyson vacuum cleaners, it’s not because of socialism, but because of a certain national pride and a dose of delusions of grandure, together with the fact that the heads of EDF, SNCF etc. really did go to the same élite schools as the top politicians and civil servants.
In reality it’s hard to imagine that the French will ever get fracking. It’s illegal at the moment (can you imagine a law against horizontal drilling?) and when the minister of industry suggested it might happen one day, when it could be done “ecologically” he was firmly slapped down by the President.