François Hollande

Because I was actually looking through the French taxation regime.

And I remember 2014, the French socialist president, Francois Hollande, he instituted a 75% tax for any earnings over a million euros.

And what we saw at that time was that hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of millionaires just left France.

which is very easy to do when you're in the European Union because you can just domicile somewhere else, right? Domicile somewhere with a lower tax rate and you can kind of come and go.

Yeah.

So New South Wales starting off there, and it's a very interesting point of view.

So the former REIA president, Lang and Simmons CEO, Leanne, came out this week talking, Leanne Pilkington came out talking about the underquoting laws in New South Wales.

And there is a risk because, I mean, a lot of these laws, they're a little bit opaque, right? There is opacity with it.

This was the same and more so with European states and Russia, particularly the Germans, the Italians, the French and Spanish, and so on.

People were still trying to have a normalised relationship with Russia and deal with what was happening in the Donbass through the vehicle of the Normandy format of peace talks which Francois Hollande, the President of France, and Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, were doing with Polashenko and Putin of Ukraine and Russia at that time.

So nation-states of Europe were trying to work on a peace process while keeping some sort of low-paying relationship with Russia on the tracks.

the uk and the us were actually seeking to develop that process throughout with the help of good old sweats like uh dan freed uh victoria newland and people who are probably not allowed a name on the uk side of the till uh so and you see that at different punctuation marks you're fairly normal and living in moscow as a parent um but also as a diplomat a british diplomat is slightly schizophrenic on the one hand as a diplomat you know you feel the intensity of the the fsb at every corner literally every street corner sometimes but from a family life perspective moscow was a terrific place to live so there's that there's that kind of uh sensation but if you look at the actual policy and how we drifted towards war you've got nobody for happening and the u s and the u k on a parallel track which is that sanctioned russia as much as we possibly can and the particular uh... you know waypoints for that uh... particularly in the midst of lots of people talk about this too and

Now, let me turn to the part of the story that keeps me awake at night.

When center-left politicians, from Bill Clinton and Obama, to Tony Blair, to Gerhard Schroeder, from François Hollande, who remembers him, the former president of France, to Andy Burnham today, they abandoned the language of class.

And that opened up a void.

in the working-class heartlands of the West.

In Madagascar, France brutally suppressed a 1947 uprising, killing thousands.

At that time, The president of France was Francois Hollande, and he later acknowledged the brutal repression and its victims.

So we have a problem with France.

The people under French rule in those days sought to exercise some freedom, and it was stepped on by the French.

I'll give you an example.

Is it the 20th maybe? Wherever François Hollande lives, he lives in one of those kind of places.

And I went there off-season.

It wasn't much.

They're calling it ultra-left riots.

It's like, really? Just because you don't want to say that they're socialists, Of course, Macron was finance minister in the socialist government of Francois Hollande a few years ago before becoming president of a new independent party.

But these people are even inventing new currents within the left just to separate themselves from, oh, no, the left has got nothing to do with those.

Those are extremists.

Now, domestically, I think it's done.

His popularity has gone down to the level of what François Hollande had previously.

when he finishes his term, so it was around 15%.

And he is despised by all sectors of society.