In a letter to the London Evening Standard of Tuesday August 9th, H MacLeod wrote the following, in connection with what I presume was a longer, paper version of this report:

Though I was encouraged by your report that there are 400,000 bloggers in the UK, I'm afraid that Britain still lags a long way behind France – which has the most online diarists per capita in Europe – particularly as far as leveraging a career from a blog is concerned (3 August).

Oh dear. Another of those Britain-lags-behind stories. France is outblogging us and we must all feel ashamed. So, the British government must help bloggers? A minister for blogging, perchance?

But no:

There may, however, be sound reasons for this.

In Britain, starting a business is relatively easy compared to starting a business in France, says Mr MacLeod:

… young French people, who live in a charming but utterly conservative, calcifying society, don't have many ways to express their ideas. Certainly starting a business is not one of them. A blog helps them bypass a culture absolutely saturated with bureaucrats.

So, the Anglo-French blog gap is a relative blessing for Britain rather than a curse. Britain, a land unsaturated with bureaucrats? Compared to France, it would seem, yes.

Under Mr MacLeod's name, the Evening Standard puts the address englishcut.com, which gets you to a blog which is all about the work and products of a bespoke Savile Row tailor, which, by the way, includes regular trips to other parts of the world, including to France. Presumably Mr MacLeod is connected in some way with this blog, although I can find no mention of him there.

So, in Britain you get your business going, and then, maybe, you blog about it. In France, you can't get your business going, so you blog instead. No wonder the blog gap is, for now, in France's favour, what with there being no business to distract them from their blogging.

There are surely other reasons for this gap, such as the fact that the French mainstream media are far more blandly unanimous than are the British media. So if could be that if France were to cut back on all its bureaucracy, it might not make much difference to that blog gap.

But it would still be worth doing for its own sake, and it is a pretty safe bet that a lot of those French bloggers are saying that too.

(Brian Micklethwait writes here).