Wonder what Britain will be like if Red Ed's PM? Just look at the socialist shambles his mate's created in France, writes SIMON HEFFER

By Simon Heffer for the Daily Mail

Published: 19:12 EST, 1 November 2013 | Updated: 20:55 EST, 1 November 2013

Just before the French presidential election last year, François Hollande, the Socialist candidate, visited London. While David Cameron couldn’t be bothered to meet him, his fellow Socialist, Ed Miliband, welcomed his counterpart with open arms.

This was not just diplomatic good manners. Mr Miliband saw in Hollande an ideological soul-mate — a man who would tear up the conservative blueprint for France imposed by the then president, Nicolas Sarkozy, and change the whole direction of Europe.

Mr Miliband could not have been more glowing in his endorsement of his Socialist confrere.

Diplomacy: Labour leader Ed Miliband met Francois Hollande just before he was elected as French President last year

‘This new leadership,’ he said, ‘is sorely needed as Europe seeks to escape from austerity, and it matters to Britain.

‘The tide is turning against an austerity approach. There needs to be a different way forward.’ He added that he and Hollande shared ‘many ideas’.

A grinning Mr Miliband seemed intoxicated by the radicalism of his visitor.

Two days before coming to London, Hollande had announced that if elected French president, he would introduce a soak-the-rich 75 per cent tax rate for those earning more than a million euros a year (about £850,000), the sort of policy that has Socialists such Mr Miliband salivating.

He had also attacked ‘the indecent wealth’ of leading businessmen, and called big business his ‘adversary’. Hollande was already on the record as saying he didn’t like rich people — despite their paying the taxes that would allow him to finance his redistributionist fantasies — and now he was showing how he proposed to put his class war into effect.

In May 2012, Hollande was elected French president by a narrow margin and he set about pursuing that ‘different way forward’. There is just one problem: the results have been truly catastrophic.

Consumption is weak and property prices have nose-dived. Unemployment is up to more than 11 per cent; growth down. Productivity down. Factories closing. Investment down. Record bankruptcies. Rocketing social security spending. Debt at 97 per cent of GDP. Wealth creators relocating abroad in their countless thousands to avoid penal personal and business taxes.

Policy: Two days before coming to London, Hollande announced that, if elected, he would introduce a 75 per cent tax rate for those earning more than a million euros a year

Unsurprisingly, while Mr Miliband may not laud Hollande any more — even he is not that stupid — the Labour leader appears, from his public pronouncements, to be hell-bent on pursuing the same suicidal course if the British electorate entrust him with power in 2015.

These policies are based on heavy taxation of wealth-creators and the doomed policy of trying to spend a nation’s way out of steep economic decline.

If there was any doubt as to his intentions, they were confirmed recently when he was asked by a member of the public when he would ‘bring back socialism’.

The son of a Marxist professor replied: ‘That’s what we are doing, sir.’ So we should beware the danger of what could be in store for Britain if Miliband has his way.

Before bringing France to its knees, Hollande won the French election not just because of the mediocre political performance of his predecessor.

Nicolas Sarkozy had promised radical reforms of the French economy and state that never manifested themselves — but also because of Sarkozy’s reputation as ‘Monsieur Bling Bling’.

With his ex-supermodel chanteuse wife, his penchant for luxury yachts and expensive accessories, Sarko was no man of the people.

Hollande campaigned as ‘Monsieur Normal’. It worked. France was heavily polarised at the election. In a country top-heavy with public sector workers — 57 per cent of French GDP is spent in the public sector, compared with 45 per cent in Britain — this State clientele and their families voted for him almost to a man.

He made no secret of his intentions. Taxes and public spending would rise, and the client state of public sector employees would expand further.

Demonstration: Last month thousands of students gathered in Paris to protest against the government's immigration policies

He would defy economic reality and, above all, he would attempt to stand up to Germany, and the austerity policies dictated by the Bundesbank on the whole of the crisis-hit eurozone. Once he took office, Hollande began to govern as though France had full economic sovereignty, and didn’t have to obey German-imposed rules about levels of debt and spending.

Decades of carefully-planned convergence on questions such as taxation, banking policy, social costs and business regulation between the two great continental powers — the Franco-German couple, as the French refer to them — were suddenly torpedoed, to the horror of German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Image: Hollande campaigned as 'Monsieur Normal' during the presidential elections

She thought she was on course to secure the European superstate via tax harmonisation, something essential to economic stability in the eurozone, and to put an end to its seemingly permanent crisis. Hollande ended that dream at a stroke.

While running an economy already living far beyond its means, his determination was to spend even more money, and to destroy yet more wealth through high taxation, was also a further, massive threat to eurozone stability.

By now, economic commentators started to discuss whether the debate should switch away from the crisis in Greece, Spain and Italy, and instead concentrate on the problems in France.

Meanwhile, a chastened Hollande began to realise that he could not simply borrow to pay for his rash campaign promises, such as hiring another 60,000 teachers, and reversing M Sarkozy’s raising of the retirement age from 60 to 62.

So he proposed a series of new taxes that have inevitably had disastrous effects.

For example, the imposition of 75 per cent taxes for top-earners drove many successful businessmen abroad — to Geneva and London. The high-earning actor Gérard Depardieu, who is a global symbol of French manhood, took Russian citizenship rather than pay three-quarters of his income to the French state.

One hard-hit business that has been lobbying Hollande for special treatment (and with hope of success because the president has a reputation for changing his mind) is the professional football industry.

With all top-flight players in the 75 per cent bracket, French football clubs demanded tax exemptions in order to stay competitive with foreign clubs who can offer better financial terms to players.

When Hollande refused to give way, footballers threatened a strike. As one of the few flourishing businesses in the increasingly benighted country, this threat could not be taken lightly.

Elsewhere across France, there has already been an exodus of young professional people to London to avoid high taxes. It is thought that up to 400,000 now live in Britain, and London is said to be the fifth largest ‘French’ city.

Future plans: Miliband could introduce higher taxes and raise public spending, similar to the moves made by Hollande while in office

Two other potentially onerous extra taxes have already been ditched. Last Sunday, under severe attack from Left and Right, the French government announced it would not impose a 15.5 per cent tax on income from savings and life assurance policies — which would have been a deeply misguided attack on the principles of thrift and prudence.

Then, on Tuesday, the beleaguered French prime minister announced that a highly controversial ‘eco-tax’ of 13 centimes per kilometre travelled by lorries weighing more than 35 tons would not be implemented. Farmers and other protesters  in Brittany attacked posts set up to monitor vehicles for the tax and blocked roads with dumped cauliflowers.

Brittany — a Socialist stronghold — has also suffered numerous factory closures, as unemployment in France relentlessly rises.

Then there are environmental taxes, such as the French Socialists’ ‘eco-tax’, much loved by Ed Miliband.

Although British and French Socialists haven’t always been close bedfellows — President François Mitterrand and his British counterparts in the Eighties did not have good relationships — but the relationship seems to have warmed up considerably since Hollande won power.

As a reward for his courtesy towards Hollande by meeting him in London last year, Mr Miliband was the first senior British politician invited to the presidential Élysée Palace after Hollande’s victory.

‘The tide is turning against an austerity approach . . . there needs to be a different way forward found,’ said the Labour leader at the time.

‘What President Hollande is seeking to do in France and what he is seeking to do in leading the debate in Europe is find that different way forward.’

The two men made common cause, dropping deficit reduction as a priority and instead seeking to spend their way to recovery.

Mr Miliband endorsed Hollande’s absurd idea that France’s problems are the result of German-imposed austerity, rather than his own idiotic, suffocating and ruinous Socialist economic policies that are crippling productivity and competitiveness and driving wealth abroad.

France’s borrowings continue to increase, not least because its government can’t find a new tax that doesn’t either reduce the amount being collected, or have to be scrapped under threat of civil disorder.

This, in short, is what the policies so beloved of Ed Miliband have achieved when implemented in France. That country’s collapse in competitiveness is the root of the catastrophe, and it cannot devalue its currency to ease the problem because its is locked into the euro.

Indeed, since 1999, when eurozone currencies were fixed, France’s labour costs have risen by 53 per cent: Germany’s have risen by just 35 per cent.

Unpopular: In a poll this week, Hollande was given the worst approval rating for a French President since 1981

Over the same period, French manufacturing production decreased by 11.4 per cent while German rose by 32 per cent. Consumption is weak and property prices have nose-dived.

There is still a maximum 35-hour week, which is crippling businesses and restricting the earning power and consumption of millions of workers.

The resulting loss of competitiveness, and absence of any plan of how to reverse it, will force the interest rates on French bonds up just as has happened in other basket-case European economies, putting the country at serious risk of being unable to afford to finance its debt.

If that seems far-fetched now, as the economy continues to deteriorate it soon won’t.

The truth is that France, because of the sheer size of its economy, and its inability to run it efficiently, now poses the greatest threat to the euro.

No wonder, in a poll this week, Hollande’s approval rating was at just 26 per cent, the lowest for any president since 1981.

His weakness, indecisiveness and unfitness for high office have led satirists to call him ‘Monsieur Flanby’, after a wobbly milk pudding.

Hollande, though, continues to be in denial about the catastrophe he has unleashed, holed up with his cronies in his Baroque palace and hoping something will turn up.

The deeply worrying aspect of all this is what it means for Britain. Thankfully, Mr Miliband remains in Opposition and hasn’t had the chance to emulate Hollande — yet.

But what is happening in France now offers a chilling vision of what could happen under a Miliband government in Britain.

All Hollande has done is bring poverty, unemployment, decline, disillusion and the desertion of France by its brightest and best in search of their fortunes elsewhere.

He was elected by a French people who were gulled into believing he could improve their lives without their having to lift a finger, and at the expense of the hated rich.

It was a disastrous mistake — and one that the people of Britain could easily make by falling for his Socialist bedfellow Ed Miliband.

The Labour leader has cleverly identified voters’ fury over energy bills and squeezed family incomes.

But if they are seduced by this pitch and vote him into power, the consequences, like we are now witnessing in France, will be catastrophic.