How Red Ed’s bed-hopping hero brought France to its knees

The government’s collapsed. The economy’s moribund. Is this our future under Miliband?

‘They get high wages and work just three hours’

a week. Predictably, when the new pro-business economy minister and former banker Emmanuel Macron called for the 35-hour week to be dismantled, the furious reaction of the Left ensured Prime Minister Manuel Valls publicly condemned the idea — which means it will remain unreformed.

Most government workers retire no later than 62, but some enjoy more generous perks.

Train drivers, for example, can retire at 50 on a final salary pension, if they have worked for 15 years. This means that a man who joins the trade at 35, and lives until he’s 80, will spend twice as long in paid retirement as he does actually working. Nonetheless, lawmakers threaten the status quo at their peril.

In June, rail workers went on strike for two weeks, shutting down the country’s lines and clashing with riot police outside the French parliament, over a plan to modernise France’s rail networks.

This week, pilots at Air France, which remains 18 per cent government owned, voted to shut down for a week in September in protest at a re- organisation of local routes. The airline’s ground staff had staged strikes earlier this month over wages and working conditions.

Maintaining France’s public sector certainly doesn’t come cheap. Taxes consume 45 per cent of France’s GDP (against 39 per cent for the Uk) and have been increased by €30 billion (£24bn) a year since Hollande came to power.

As ever, in a socialist economy, the chief victim is the private

Washout: Francois Hollande is the least popular French president since records began sector. Swingeing social charges mean that companies wishing to employ someone must typically pay an additional 40-50 per cent of their new worker’s salary in additional taxes.

Successful entrepreneurs, and indeed anyone with assets ( including property and investments) worth more than €800,000 (£640,000), must also pay a wealth tax.

It works on a sliding scale — an individual whose home is worth £500,000, and who has savings of £150,000, must each year write a cheque to the government for 0.5 per cent of everything they own, or £ 3,250; anyone worth over £8 million must pay 1.5 per cent annually, or £120,000. on top of the usual taxes.

Little wonder that there are often said to be more French bankers living in South kensington than in Paris, while its multi-millionaires have long since fled to Monaco.

The greatest threat to enterprise is, however, France’s stringent labour laws, which famously stipulate that all workers must have a minimum of 25 days holiday a year (most get far more), and make it illegal to require an employee to work for more than 35 hours a week.

Companies, large and small, must adhere to a ‘Labour Code,’ which is 3,492 pages long and, among other things, imposes comically burdensome rules on firms that grow beyond a certain size.

At 50 employees, for example, a business is required to create a staff ‘works council’ and separate ‘health committee.’ These groups must be consulted on decisions large and small. Indeed, they even have a say when a manager decides to rearrange his office furniture — on account of the fact that it might cause ‘stress’ for employees.

As Sophie Pedder, a Paris-based journalist from the Economist who wrote a book on the excesses of French bureaucracy entitled ‘Le déni Français’ [French denial], points out, the rules mean France now has twice as many firms with 49 employees as it does with 50.

Perhaps the most vivid illustration of the stultifying effect of labour laws can be found in Amiens, an industrial town two hours north of Paris where in January Good- year shut a vast tyre factory, with the loss of almost 1,200 jobs.

The facility has been threatened with closure for years. But in early 2013 it was offered a lifeline by Maurice Taylor, a U. S. tycoon behind Titan tyres, who wanted to buy it — provided trade unions would agree to changes in working practices.

They would do no such thing. So Taylor abandoned his plan and wrote a furious letter to Arnaud Montebourg, the French industrial renewal minister.

‘The French work force gets paid high wages but only works three hours. They get one hour for breaks and lunch, talk for three and work for three. I told this to the French union workers to their faces. They told me that’s the French way!’

Today, the plant sits empty, and employs no one.

Hollande’s new government now faces a vote of confidence in the French parliament, where it boasts only a thin majority.

It’s expected to survive for now, only because the main CentreRight opposition party, the Union for a Popular Movement, is currently leaderless and in disarray following the arrest last month of unpopular former leader Nicolas Sarkozy on corruption charges.

So what, incidentally, does today’s Labour leader make of the mess in which his ‘inspiring’ socialist friend now finds himself?

In 2012, Miliband was invited by Hollande to the Elysee Palace, where he was greeted like a touring world leader. ‘We get on extremely well,’ he told newspapers.

Two years later, that cocky ardour has cooled. Indeed, Miliband has not passed comment on his friend from across the Channel for several months.

Presumably, given the dismal state of France’s economy, he no longer finds it convenient to be compared to the political soul mate he once revered.

Additional reporting: PeTeR AlleN and TIM FINAN.