Is Emmanuel Macron’s France in the vanguard of a new economic revolution?

As he delivered his televised address to the French public on Monday night, following a month of street protests and intensifying mob violence, Emmanuel Macron sat behind a gilt-framed antique desk, flanked by a pair of golden lampshades. Behind him loomed one of the imposing golden doors of the Elysee Palace's Salon Dore. Yes, "dore" means golden.

President of the rich? Whatever gave people that idea? Yet appearances can deceive. Despite the Marie Antoinette-style furnishings of the Elysee and the complaints of the gilets jaunes protestors, the statistics suggest the French Fifth Republic is actually a more egalitarian nation than its major peer economies.

According to the World Inequality Database, the share of total pre-tax income flowing to the pockets of the top 1 per cent of people in France is around 11 per cent. That compares with 13 per cent in Germany, 14 per cent here in the UK and 20 per cent in the US.

Post-tax income inequality, as measured by the Gini index, is also lower in France (29 per cent) than the UK (35 per cent) and the US (39 per cent) and roughly the same as in Germany.

The wealth share of the top 1 per cent in France is also well below that of the US. Comparisons with the UK and Germany when it comes to the distribution of wealth are more difficult due to a lack of comparable data but they are likely to be broadly similar.

What about economic performance? The French unemployment rate (9 per cent) is higher than the US (4 per cent), the UK (4 per cent) and Germany (3.3 per cent). Yet average real wages seem to have grown much more in France than in the UK and the US since the financial crisis a decade ago. Here in Britain they are still lower than they were in 2008.

The policies Macron announced on Monday - an increase in the minimum wage, a reduction in the overtime tax, an encouragement for employers to pay workers a Christmas bonus, scrapping an increase in the tax on pensioners - were mainly about putting money in ordinary people's pockets.

According to France's public accounts minister, this package will cost around €10bn (£9bn), or around half of one per cent of GDP. That's not negligible, especially considering the government was hoping to see its budget deficit decline from 2.8 per cent of GDP next year to 2.2 per cent in 2020 and the eurozone's rules define a 3 per cent deficit ceiling.

While Macron's package has been interpreted in some quarters as a "turn to the left", his refusal to reinstate the wealth tax on those with total assets of more than €1.3m, which he scrapped last year, shows there are limits to how far he is prepared to redistribute. He may, ultimately, need to capitulate on that too, just as he has on the new diesel tax, which sparked the recent protests.

The president suggested the unrest has stemmed from "40 years of malaise". That could be interpreted as an attempt to spread the blame after 19 months in office characterised by unforced errors, but there is something in this diagnosis.

While there are those like Marine Le Pen who ascribe the sense of dissatisfaction in France primarily to immigration, a glance at the demands of the (admittedly diverse) gilets jaunes suggests a dominant economic element.

In the wake of the destruction left by the Second World War, France basked in the "trente glorieuses" - thirty years of rapid economic growth and rising living standards for most.

Since the 1980s the rate of both overall GDP per capita growth and productivity growth in France has slowed. It seems to have shifted down again in the wake of the financial crisis a decade ago.

What's ominous for Macron is that this seems to be part of a global trend of slowing economic growth, suggesting it will not easily be turned around by policies in one country.

Defeatism is usually poor counsel and so it remains today. There surely remains potential not just for France, but for all nations, to increase national productivity growth through investments in infrastructure, research and skills. Living standards can be improved not just through redistribution but through a new generation of low-carbon technologies, through institutions that foster a greater sense of economic security, and through governance innovations that enable people and communities to take more control of their lives.

Yet the transition out of malaise is unlikely to be smooth. And if the economic pie is not growing as fast as it was, arguments and tensions about its division are likely to become more intense. Perhaps in this respect, as it was in 1789, France is in the revolutionary vanguard of nations once again.

Welcome to Jim Ratcliffe’s Britain

Not since the days of Margaret Thatcher has a trade union been so comprehensively outmanoeuvred. In 2013 the petrochemical giant Ineos announced that its Grangemouth refinery, Scotland's biggest industrial site, was losing money.

To restore profitability, the management demanded cuts to employees' benefits, including an end to their final salary pension scheme.

The workforce refused and, represented by the Unite union, voted to strike. But when Ineos threatened to shut down the entire plant in response they caved in, agreeing, against the advice of the union, to swallow all of the management's terms, including a pledge not to strike for three years.

The founder of Ineos and the man who broke the resistance of those Scottish fitters and labourers was Jim Ratcliffe, named by the Sunday Times at the weekend as Britain's richest man, with his 60 per cent stake in the company valued at around £20bn.

The media has made much of Ratcliffe's humble origins, growing up in a council house in Oldham, and being publicity-shy. Yet his reticence in promoting his interests should not be exaggerated.

There was a disturbing coda to the Grangemouth showdown. Documents revealed last year (thanks to a rare freedom of information request that was not frustrated by officials) show that in the months before the 2013 industrial action, Ratcliffe had been privately lobbying the former chancellor, George Osborne, on the need to erode union rights. The Ineos man urged Osborne to "remove the right to strike, directly or indirectly" over threats to workers' pensions.

Billionaire business owners can get a private audience with a chancellor in which to push their preferred policies. How many trade unions have had similar opportunities in recent years? The "beer and sandwiches" these days are for reserved for executives.

We can speculate on why Osborne's door was open to Ratcliffe. Ineos had ostentatiously shifted its headquarters out of the UK to Switzerland in 2010 in order to trim the company's corporation tax bill.

Personal pique also seems to have played a role in the departure. Ineos, struggling with a large debt burden in the wake of the global financial crisis, had asked earlier that year for a special VAT tax break from the UK government. The favour had not been granted. Ratcliffe vented his frustration at that time at not being able to make his case directly to a government minister (although he apparently did get access to the powerful cabinet secretary Jeremy Heywood).

As part of that 2013 capitulation, Grangemouth's workers agreed to a three-year pay freeze. That's a microcosm of the wider economy over the past decade. In real terms average wages are more than 6 per cent below where they were 10 years ago - this has been the worst decade for pay growth since the Napoleonic wars. And official projections suggest the pre-recession peak for wages will not be reattained until well into the next decade.

Theresa May's preferred form of Brexit - leaving the single market and the customs union - will, according to the government's own projections, compound this economic damage to living standards.

Incidentally, Ratcliffe is a fan of Brexit, and has been lobbying the government to reduce environmental taxes on companies like Ineos when Britain leaves the European Union.

Wages and living standards for most people in Britain remain under severe pressure. But some aren't doing too badly. The combined wealth of Britain's 1,000 richest residents rose 10 per cent in 2017 according to the Sunday Times' calculations. That's a £66bn increase, with £15bn of that jump accounted for by Ratcliffe alone. It's hard to credit that Ratcliffe's wealth has risen so dramatically in only a year; his net worth was either under-measured before, or possibly overestimated now. Much remains opaque since Ineos is a privately held company.

Yet, whatever the truth about his fortune, Ratcliffe makes a suitable figurehead for the modern British economy. Soaring wealth for the union-busting, tax-avoiding, regulation-reviling boss with ready access to the ear of the country's top politicians and policymakers. Stagnant wages, hollowed-out pensions and chronic insecurity for his workers.

Theresa May said she wants to create an economy that works for everyone. At the moment, it feels like a country that works for the likes of Jim Ratcliffe.