The Lescure Report, or how taxes pay the exorbitant salaries of actors

Yeah great, but who's paying for it?

The Lescure Report is designed to help the progress of culture in the digital age euuhhh, sorry, is designed to screw even more tax out of the French public in order to pay the fat-cat salaries of has-been actors with alcohol issues. That said, to be fair it also attempts to address the problem of the illegal downloading of films, music and other cultural creation and it contains some interesting ideas.

But a part of this panoply of proposed legislation involves slapping a tax on tablets, smartphones, computers, online TVs and other digital equipment in order to help finance cultural production, particularly the French film industry. Fair enough? Let's see.

François Hollande's proposed 75% tax on high salaries resulted in many rich people leaving the country, the most high-profile of whom was arguably Gérard Depardieu, one of France's most successful - and rich - actors. Be that as it may, the massive media focus on his salary and that of other actors led to accusatory fingers pointing out what everybody know for years - that the public was paying through the nose for an inefficient state-funded film and music industry which milks the public.

So here is a list of the methods the government uses to maintain this system, a system which is one of the reasons why the quality of many French films is so poor these days (but that's another subject);

If you live in France, you pay;

A TV licence, which finances not only TV, but the full-length feature films for cinemas it co-produces.

A tax on 'private copying', which is applied to anything - video and audio cassettes, CD roms, hard drives etc - upon which video, images, music and text may be stored.

Your cinema tickets incorporate a tax which subsidises the film industry as well as the trailers for upcoming films.

A 'Telecom tax', which compensates for the loss of income on national TV stations due to the suppression of adverts in the evening. This money is, in turn, partially invested in financing new films.

Local and national taxes, which are often used to co-produce films.

Unemployment contributions on salary, which go to pay unemployment benefit for unemployed workers in the music, theatre, and film industries. These contributions also help to fund the SOFICA - the state-run company which finances the cinema and audiovisual industries.

And now they are to tax our phones and computers etc to subsidise the same lame-duck industry!

State support for the arts is of course a good thing, but you know what they say about a good thing, you can have too much of it. That is the case here and if the film industry was forced to stand on its own two feet a little, all the dross and garbage and jobs-for-the-boys which characterises the world of an elite clique of actors and directors would be forced to sink or swim a little uniquely on its artistic merit or otherwise. I know it's difficult to get the dosage - the mix - right in this area, but it's high time something was done to change this sclerotic and self-serving ripoff.

Oh, and I nearly forgot, do you know who drew up the Lescure Report? It was Pierre Lescure, an influential French journalist, TV personality and businessman who is also....yup, you guessed first time.....a film actor.

Well well well, quelle surprise..

Hollande's confiscatory '75%' and other milk the rich policies are getting their predictable commuppance

Hollande imitates a man of state

I think that rich people should be made to pay much higher taxes than they do now and that it's more than time that the markets, banks, hedge funds and all the rest of those money-spinning schemes for the rich should be taxed more, and I believe that tax rates on major companies (but not small ones) are outrageously low. Finally, I and most other people living in France would like to see Hollande succeed in taking concrete and efficient action to ensure these measures are taken.

But I also consider that waging an unfair, discriminatory and confiscatory - in other words illegal - fiscal war on any section of the population, including the rich, is not the way to go about taxing citizens in a democratic country, and nor is it efficient, as three recent examples have made more than obvious.

Hollande and his government have been ferociously intent on hastily and ill-preparedly trying, and failing for various reasons, to enact such laws ever since they came to power, and today saw Holland fail yet again as the French Constitutional Council threw out his most emblematic proposal, that of taxing the rich at 75%.

The Council rejected the measure for the very two reasons that most level-headed people have been saying it would for months. It was ruled to be confiscatory and thus illegal (the last time confiscatory laws of this amplitude were enacted was in World War Two during the Occupation of France, when they were applied to Jews only), and the Council also decided that it did not affect households equally because of its excessively one-sided effort to raise tax revenue. The council also refused a proposal for a 75% tax on complementary retirement pensions and two more minor measures because they too were confiscatory.

In other words, these proposed measures, which so pleased left-of-centre voters during the election campaign and thus got Hollande elected, have been reduced to political dust and the government will have to start all over again with a new and less discriminatory policy. That means we will have to wait for oh, four months at least whilst they go back to the drawing board and come up with something that is actually legal in constitutional terms.

Meanwhile, the rich will continue to pay more or less the current, much lower, rate of 45%. What a fiasco and what a waste of precious government time given the urgency of the need for tax reform. It was a ham-fisted effort to bludgeon discriminatory legislation into existence against all common sense which has already seen thousands of badly-needed tax euros disappear abroad with their owners. And the cherry on the cake is that even if they had gone through, these measures would have resulted in no more than a few hundred million euros of revenue - a drop in the ocean of the country's debt.

The second example of this administration's stubborn refusal to put its brain into gear before putting its mouth into motion concerns Minister for Industrial Renewal and polical loose cannon Arnaud Montebourg's attempt to renationalise a sprawling steelworking facility owned by the Mittal conglomerate and comprising several separate steel-related activities. He tried this on because he didn't like what the company's chairman was planning for the future, which he believed (wrongly as it turned out) involved massive layoffs.

This harebrained idea was also decided in great haste, essentially by Montebourg alone, and it too was judged to be potentially legally impossible because of its spoliatory and discriminatory nature. Not only that, both Hollande and PM Jean-Marc Ayrault were warned that it would send out a disastrous message to foreign investors at a time when France desperately needs them, so they put the kibosh on it and did what they should have done in the first place, which was to come to an agreement with the company's owners. Montebourg was furious and is now being touted as a possible contender for replacement in the next government reshuffle, particularly if he continues to decide policy alone and on-the-hoof, which is probably why we haven't heard a peep from him since then.

The third example involves housing the homeless, particularly during winter, and thus it was that Minister of Territorial Equality and Housing Cécile Duflot woke up one morning a few weeks ago to announce to a waiting world that she was going to implement a policy of government requisition of empty houses and business premises which have been empty for over 6 months and put homeless people in them. Brilliant! Except that it wasn't.

Most of this kind of property is owned by the rich or big companies, and as French law only allows this kind of measure in cases of 'national emergency' it soon became clear that it wasn't going to fly and that there may even be grounds under these conditions for the buildings' owners to contest the decision on the grounds that this situation is not a 'national emergency' and could thus be ascertained to be, yes, you guessed, spoliation. Again.

The government also realised, weeks after announcing the plan, that it was fatally flawed in many other areas. These properties would have needed massive investment (particularly office premises) to adapt them to human habitation, many of them are not situated in areas which are suitable for those who would live in them (too far from work sources and other facilities), the plan would have necessitated a whole infrastructure of administrative staff to oversee the project and select candidates etc and, most importantly, the procedure as it stands takes months. Even housing associations said that this was not a substitute for a housing policy.

All of which explains why a humiliated Duflot was forced to announce yesterday that she was abandoning the idea just weeks after coming up with it because the procedure would take too long as it couldn't be shortened without being unconstitutional and that "no senior politician can break into a building with a crowbar. The state is subject to the rule of law."

Another climbdown, another reversal, another waste of time which has pushed back efforts to help the homeless and another reason to think that this government seems incapable of creating policies which oblige the better off to help which are not totally over the top, illegal, and immoral.

It's high time this government abandoned its ideological hit-the-rich attitudes and began legislating not to please popular sentiment for relatively paltry sums of tax revenue but in order to do what is possible, as in legal. This government is wasting far too much preciously-needed time in its vain (in both senses of the word) efforts to legislate the impossible.

My dad used to say that "you're better off with 75% of something than 100% of nothing."

He was right.

Gérard Depardieu isn't the only 'shabby' individual in France

"Who art the shabbiest Sire, ye or I?"

Gérard Depardieu is (was?) one of France's best-paid actors. His long career has seen him perform in 170 films and pick up two Césars for best actor as well as a Goden Globe for best actor and many other awards at film festivals around the world. The other side of the coin is his fiery personality and reputation as a heavy drinker, which have often led to some rather unflattering headlines along the lines of 'Depardieu urinates on floor in airliner/punches a photographer/crashes his scooter whilst drunk.' In other words, he is a rather singular man.

Enter the Hollande administration with its promises to tax the rich at 75%, introduce stiff new taxes for businesses and adopt a populist anti-rich stance, all of which were designed to extend Hollande's 'honeymoon period' after being elected. This policy has resulted in an exodus of wealthy French businessmen and others, who have left for kinder economic climes, taking their money with them and thus rendering the whole exercise relatively self-defeating. But no matter, the hunt for the rich is on and the government hopes that the public will notice and approve of its actions.

Depardieu joined the long queue to leave and eventually bought a house in a small town in Belgium just next to the French border. His decision resulted in a barrage of criticism from the government which reached boiling point last week when PM Jean-Marc Ayrault called his actions 'rather shabby', and incensed Socialists are now calling for people like Depardieu who leave the country for tax reasons to be stripped of their French nationality and made to pay a hefty 'exit tax.' Hollande has even gone so far as to bully his smaller Belgian neighbour and ask it to start taxing its rich residents more heavily.

Depardieu finally responded to the heavy flak today in an irony-laden open letter in the French press in which he denounces Ayrault's remarks, says that the government's anti-rich policies are punishing "success, creation and talent" in France and angrily declares that  he's sending his French passport back to the government in protest, giving up his French nationality, and forfeiting his rights to Social Security aid.

Now I am no fan of Depardieu believe you me, be it his acting or his personality, and his actions do indeed remind one of 'rats leaving the sinking ship' but this affair does at least have the merit of cristallising the ugly undercurrent of venimous class sentiment which has begun to permeate French society over the last year or so.

Things were bad enough under Sarkozy, when the country almost had a nervous breakdown so obssessed were the French about the polarising effect he was believed to be having on the country. This is why the French didn't so much elect Hollande as evict Sarkozy. They would have voted for your alcoholic neighbour as long as he or she was anti-Sarkozy.

But the atmosphere has become even worse since, and the current administration seems to be intent on using the rich as their whipping boy, their scapegoat for all that is wrong with the country. Of  course the rich deserve some stiff scriticism as well as more taxes and stricter laws on finance - after all, we're all paying more so why not them? - but the current and heavy-handed clumsy witch-hunt approach is not working, the public knows it, and it won't extend Hollande's honeymoon for long.

Take the vindictive words of the government's class-warfare militant and Minister for Industrial Renewal Arnaud Montebourg who, during the recent negotiations over the future of the Florange Steelworks and its jobs, acrimoniously declared that the company who owns them, Mittal, "was not welcome in France", that it "lied" habitually, that it owed "astronomical' sums of money to the taxman (without offering any evidence for either) and that "we don't want Mittal in France any more." He went on to unilaterally announce that the government would renationalise the site.

Montebourg and other ministers have shown a similar disdain for other large companies and rich individuals recently, but Montebourg's latest cack-handed outburst proved to be too much even for this government and president, who disowned his words for fear of a negative backlash from foreign investors, both current and potential.

The last thing France needs right now is to scare off investors by declaring full-scale war on them and the rich in general. This shabby rabble-rousing tactic is already blowing up in their faces and the government will regret it before next summer.

So where's the opposition, whose job it is to act as a democratic counterbalance to government? They are nowhere to be seen of course because their actions are just as shabby as those of their opponents.

The UMP has been hijacked by Jean-François Copé, its self-proclaimed leader who only sits in the party president's chair because of a blatant fraud perpetrated by his henchmen during the recent internal party presidential election. This man is arrogantly defying the wishes of the 80% of his party members and about the same percentage of the public who are demanding a rerun of the election. He is a political bandit whose banana-republic mentality is a disgrace not only to his party but to French politics as a whole.

Not that the Socialists can criticise them too loudly of course (and they have been wise enough not to moreover), because their own party leader was not even 'elected.' He was quite simply parachuted in as the head of the party by a troika of top Socialists who designated him during an hour-long secret meeting in some office or another in the parliament building. No internal election, no opportunity for rank-and-file members to express their preferences. If that's not shabby behaviour I don't know what is.

But perhaps the most illustrative example of boorish behaviour in French politics during this government's tenure came on the very first day of the new parliament, a day upon which all elected parliamentarians are held to respect the parliamentary tradition which demands that they all shake the hand of all first-time députés during a special welcoming ceremony. But they shamefully refused to follow this tradition of common courtesy and refused to shake the hands of the only two Front National députés in parliament, both of whom had been elected for the first time.

That was a disgrace. Make no mistake, I have no truck for the hateful policies of this, an extreme-right wing party, but whether we like it or not these two French citizens were given their parliamentary mandates by other French citizens in a free and open election, and all politicians in any civilised parliament owe it to those who voted for them them to respect the democratically-expressed decision of the people and refrain from ostracising legally-elected political opponents in such an insulting manner.

Yes, Depardieu's behaviour is reprehensible in some respects, and yes, tighter fiscal laws and control for the rich and big business must be introduced, and quickly, but when one looks at who is giving them lessons on civilised and respectful behaviour the only word which comes to mind is 'hypocrisy.'

The French word for 'shabby', or 'pathetic' is 'minable', and I can't begin to count the number of times I have discussed French politics, multinational business practice and tax-exiling rich elites with friends and others only to hear 'minable' used to describe them.

No wonder then that just under 80% of French citizens declare in polls that they are sick to death of the behaviour of their political and other elites, and no wonder either that the Hollande-Ayrault tandem has reached the lowest level of popularity of any administration since the beginning of the 5th Republic.

'Minable'? They all are, the whole lot of 'em, and I wouldn't trust any of 'em as far as I could chuck 'em.....