"Ric" wrote sparkily
They are waterproof, the plugs are waterproof, the wires are
waterproof etc. The French safety standards are perfectly good. I think in
UK the standards of electrical safety are unnecessarily high and expensive.
Don't leap to the conclusion that French standards are sloppy - I lived in
Germany and Switzerland before moving here, and in both countries it was the
same. UK is the odd man out.

It's perfectly true. The "schuko" 220V socket used all over europe is
reversable, and makes no distinction between live and neutral. It is
invariably unswitched, and people are perfectly happy with it. It is
largely unshuttered, depending on the depth of the holes and thier
relative inaccesability to provide protection against poking things
in, along with parental supervision and self-responsibility.

I've even seen Norwegian installations where the power is fed to a
strip of sockets with a plug! It's considered perfectly safe because
it's coloured red and everyone knows that red plugs have live pins
when you pull them out.

We have a range of design features - earth first connection, shuttered
sockets, switched sockets, designs unsuitable for outdoor fixing,
non-waterproofable cable entries, which are different from the way
that other people do it. But that doesn't make any one system right
or wrong - they are two different systems developed over years to
reach the same objective: an acceptable level of risk at a reasonable
price. I can remember in france single core wire cleated on the
outside of the plaster with wooden batterns every 200mm, down to light
switches. It was not dangerous, because it was normal.

A classic example is the use of multi-plug adaaptors in sockets.
There is a hysterical reaction to those in much of the UK because of
the risk of overloading. But people cheerfully put a 6-way block on a
short flex into a socket and think it is perfectly acceptable. It's
wierd. Both the adaptor and the plug on the flying lead are fused,
and the whole system is designed to work continuously up to the fuse
rating. But we get the vapours about one and are sanguine about the
other, when they are topologically equivalent.

And don't get me started on the stupid little plastic things that
parents are advised to put into thier sockets!