Well Frog for what it is worth you are wrong.
The IMC rating is a FULL instrument rating.
It qualifies the pilot to fly on instruments.
Of course, instrument conditions here are rather the same as instrument conditions any where else, unless the laws of physics are different in Europe.
Put simply you are either qualified to fly when you cant see out of the window or you are not.
You may care to look up the two things it does not enable a pilot to do in the UK so far as instrument flying is concerned. Unfortunately there are some maverick instrument pilots here who do one of those two things in single engine aircraft - which says rather less for their professionalism.
IR and IMCr are names, terms we use to define a rating.
There is no such thing as a FULL instrument rating.
If you wish, the IMCr is not an ICAO instrument rating, but then neither is the FAA or JAR IR, both of which include differences. So the IMCr is not an ICAO rating, the JAR and FAA IRs are ICAO instrument ratings but with differences filed.
In the UK more private pilots hold an IMCr than there are private IR holders in the whole of Europe.
There has been one accident involving a pilot with an IMC rating in the last thirty years.
There have been far more accidents involving pilots with instrument ratings.
In fact, all other factors aside, instrument rated pilots in Europe are far more likely to kill themselves than IMC rated pilots.
If you were a responsible controller you would file on the pilots you have referred to in your posts that abuse the law. I am not aware of these reports on which the CAA would have been obliged to act. You do no one any favours by your failure to do so in the circumstances you describe.
You would benefit from grasping how the rating is used in the UK by the vast majority of instrument pilots. You would find it informative to look at the statistics because historical evidence is the best way of judging whether the system is safe.
The ultimate safety solution is to react to evidence that suggests something is unsafe, be it because the same accident keeps occurring or the same group of pilots keep killing themselves.
There is evidence that pilots in France kill themselves because they do not have an IMC rating. You ignore this evidence at your peril and their peril.
More importantly, your testimony is based on anecdotal evidence regarding pilots that are acting illegally - if that was the basis for any study then clearly we should ban alcohol because some drivers drink and drive whilst ignoring the vast majority that do not.
I am sorry Frog but I don’t find merit in your posts and I don’t believe that if you were an ATC you would post in the way that you have. I am in correspondence with a French ATC and you and his views are so far apart that I find it very difficult to believe you are who you purport to be.