Boris: Influx of talent leaving 'crazed socialist' France

Boris Johnson has said that talent is fleeing France and coming to Britain due to its ‘crazed socialist’ economy.

The Mayor of London told LBC Radio that the Labour party wrongly admires the French and their economy-damaging laws and benefits.

He said that Labour “have an overt admiration for the way things are done in France, where they have unemployment now running at around 12 per cent.”

Johnson went on to say: “You’ve got huge numbers of talented French people fleeing France at the moment because it’s a crazed socialist, 1970s version of a European economy.”

This comes after George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer, said in last week’s Budget that Yorkshire has created more jobs than the whole of France.

Ségolène Royal, Minister for Ecology, Sustainable Development & Energy, replied to this by saying that the Chancellor and Prime Minister had abandoned “the traditional British sense of fair play”, accusing David Cameron of launching “spiteful and inappropriate” attacks on the state of her country’s economy.

“In the end, what goes around comes around,” she said.