François Hollande hits election trail in France's sixth biggest city: London

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/29/francois-hollande-campaigns-london-miliband

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The cross-Channel spat over mad cow disease may be distant history, replaced instead by barbs over European treaties or the state of the economy, but London still loves to serve visiting French politicians a good slab of British beef.

When François Hollande, the left-wing frontrunner in the French presidential race, arrived in London for his first major international campaign trip on Wednesday, the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, hosted a lunch of roast beef and Yorkshire pudding at the Palace of Westminster.

Hollande, recently emerged from the most famous crash diet in French politics, was then handed a big bottle of Scotch whisky by the Labour leader to take home as a gift. All of this was a mere trifle compared with the record 12 hours Hollande had spent at Paris's agricultural show the day before, admiring heifers and tasting sausage.

His campaign trip to London was a big symbolic gesture. The world diplomatic stage has become a new battleground in the French election.

The open support of the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, for Nicolas Sarkozy was followed by David Cameron's "good luck" message to the French president at a Paris summit this month. Hollande, a former Socialist party leader who has never served in government and is not well known outside France, had arrived by Eurostar to build his image as an international statesman.

London has become a crucial campaign destination for candidates in the French presidential race. The UK capital is home to about 300,000 of the 400,000 French expats in Britain – so many French that it is considered France's sixth biggest city.

Sarkozy cemented the political importance of "Paris-on-Thames" during his presidential election campaign in 2007, staging an unprecedented rally in London urging expats to come home, saying: "France is still your country even if you're disappointed by it!" To some, it seemed as extraordinary as Cameron taking a campaign battle bus through the villages of expat Brits in western France. Now it has become routine.

In front of the pine cone-filled fireplace in Miliband's office, Hollande reiterated his demand that the world of finance "gone mad" must be regulated. Later, before a backdrop of the Houses of Parliament, he told French TV crews: "I'm not getting at that part of finance which supports the real economy, I'm going after mad finance which disrupts markets and puts states into dependency, which uses financial products and has no more links with economic activity."

In a speech at King's College London, he stressed that the new European treaty had to be renegotiated so that it was not just about budgetary discipline but also about growth.

An obliging Miliband gave Hollande a leg up on his global quest for financial regulation, praising his "leadership, energy and dynamism" on the issue. But each to their own on the subject of tax: Hollande defended his planned new tax bracket for the mega-rich, which would see annual income above €1m (£630,000) taxed at a European record rate of 75%. He said it was a disincentive for fat-cat excesses.

Miliband stressed that the top tax bracket in the UK would not go above 50%. Hollande's message was that if in May he became the first left-wing French president since François Mitterrand, he could shake up the way Europe's mostly right-wing governments were approaching the crisis, promising an element of change in Europe, which "also translates in Great Britain". Asked about Cameron's recent show of support for Sarkozy at a Paris summit, Hollande couldn't resist: "I always like to see world leaders being nice to each other," he smiled.