Never mind the rich, France is forcing its young and poorer talent into fiscal exile too

Get Out!

The French government's reaction to Gérard Depardieu's self-imposed fiscal exile to Belgium has revealed what many commentators have been saying for some years now - France is a country which doesn't like itself any more.

That a Prime minister and members of his government can violently criticise a rich man who quite rightly - and legally - seeks to save himself from a vindictive witch-hunt against the country's rich in the form of what amounts to mafia-style racketeering is bad enough, but that he does so by trying to stir up populist and socially-divisive sentiment by saying that they are 'shabby' is almost criminal.

The government is hiding behind a fig-leaf of 'economic patriotism' which laughably assumes that people should love the country more than their own well-being, but nobody in his right mind sincerely believes that, nobody ever paid taxes for patriotic reasons, and the bald fact is that this administration has gone further than any other to stigmatise those who succeed in life.

To his credit, François Hollande has now recognised that this tactic has backfired badly and he is desperately back-pedalling in an effort to counter the negative message France is sending not only to its own talented entrepreneurs but also - and more damagingly - to foreign investment. But the damage has already been done and a lot of France's richer citizens are leaving the country.

Most French governments of the last 40 years have adopted divisive tactics to resolve economic problems. Immigrants have suffered systematic official and unofficial discrimination and no real effort has been made to integrate them, old people with low income have been neglected and forgotten, the principles of equality and freedom were ditched years ago and now it's the turn of the rich to become the scapegoats.

Scapegoats is what French govenments do best to avoid taking the heat. French politics was hijacked a long time ago by a gerontocratic elite which has shut down all meaningful debate, concentrated all the power in Paris and confiscated official figures on sensitive subjects, and turned French politics into an antidemocratic farce, as Fillon and Copé have just shown. Governments have piled up debt to buy off the voters with no visible results and France's exceptionally high unemployment rates have persisted for years because they are an inbuilt feature of an economy which refuses to become competitive an a fast-changing world.

The result is a country which has no faith in its leaders and no faith in the future. Pessimism and blaming others have become national sports, jealousy reigns, and no country in the world takes so many antidepressive drugs in a vain effort to combat its doom-and-gloom outlook.

Of all the losers in this sorry mess however, none have lost more than those who constitute the country's most vital resource - its young people. Unemployment for 18-25-year-olds is in excess of 25% with lower rates in affluent 'white' areas and rates as high as 60% in some immigrant areas, and the current generation shall be the first since World War Two to have lower living standards than their parents did.

It's not surprising then that young people are leaving France in ever-increasing numbers, and, like their rich elders, they are moving to Britain and other Anglophone countries, Belgium, the Far East and anywhere else where they may earn a decent living.

And the backlash is picking up speed. In a scathing attack on their own country and its unwillingness to create real jobs, members of 'Barrez-vous' ('get out!'), an association which offers advice for young people who want to leave France published an article in Libération with the headline 'Young people of France, your salvation is elsewhere: Get Out!' which began with the words "Young people of France, this is not an incitation to fiscal evasion, but to evasion pure and simple."

Other, similar, websites are springing up all the time, and the press is publishing more and more articles written by young people who have found success in other countries. Non-whites often express their relief at being judged on their talent and not on their skin colour, particularly in Britain and the United States, and most agree that they have more options for the future abroad than they did in France.

Britain is a particularly popular destination, to the point where London's French population of 400,000 makes it the 6th-biggest French city in demographic terms (I wrote more about this here.) That explains why so many French politicians go there to press the flesh during elections. Needless to say, having to beg for almost half-a-million votes in a foreign country, and Britain in particular (quelle horreur!) represents a humiliation for France.

I see this phenomenon often in my own life too, and I know a lot of younger people who have either left France or plan to do so. They include my two nieces, one of whom has been depressed since she came back from a year of study in London to complete her studies here. She, like many others in her position, finds France to be an unappealing place with few prospects and she intends to move back to London as soon as possible.

The facts are undeniable but this government, like its predecessors, refuses to recognise them. And, like its predecessors, the only 'jobs' the government are able to 'create' are what they call 'Jobs for the young'. They are nothing of the sort however. They consist of activities like standing on metro platforms to 'help' users get on and off the trains. As if people need help to get on or off a train! They are soul-destroying, a waste of time, and worse still a waste of public money because those who accept them are paid a pittance by taxpayer's money, so not one cent of wealth is being created. That is how the government treats France's young people.

But young people are now voting with their feet in revolt against their humiliation by a government which cannot see that they are, or should be, the country's future.

So, Messrs Hollande, Ayrault and others, having stigmatised the rich for all the country's woes and having called one of them - and by implication all of them - 'shabby' for having left this execrable mess, is your next target to be the young?

After all, they are also leaving the country in ever-increasing numbers so are they too - and just like the rich - 'shabby'?

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.....