After an expensive week in the Alps, I can see the Conservatives are stuck on the nursery slopes of economic policy When I left for a pre-election break in the French Alps the air in London was full of talk of strikes and distorted parallels with the winter of discontent in 1978-79. However the only strike we came across was a French rail strike in Easter week, which meant that those of us trying to get back to London from Briançon had to take taxis to Turin and fly. In the process we discovered that there seems to be as much discontent with the political class in France as there is in Britain, and the public services are generally considered to be rather less reliable than they used to be.