“French president François Hollande has bowed to massive pressure for business tax cuts to pull France’s economy out of slump and stave off industrial decline, ditching a core element of his socialist platform. Company taxes will fall by €20bn a year equal to 1pc of GDP, to be phased in gradually by 2015 under a convoluted system of rebates. Spending cuts will plug the revenue gap in order to meet the EU’s 3pc deficit target. Critics call it the most humiliating U-turn in French politics since François Mitterrand abandoned his disastrous experiment of ‘Socialism in one country’ under a D-Mark currency peg in 1983.”
