FRANCE’S elites are doing all they can to quash the outcome of the election in which the left-wing New Popular Front came first.

President Macron refuses to ask it to form a government. He tries, too, to break up the left alliance, seeking to exclude France Unbowed, whose leader Jean-Luc Melenchon has become as much a bogeyman to the French Establishment as Jeremy Corbyn is over here.

The bankers weigh in, saying the platform which won the election — a lower retirement age, price controls, pay rises — spells economic disaster. 

So would they here if a prospective government offered real change. Bankers do not represent the public interest but their own: in Britain, the banks are amassing record-breaking profits off the same Bank of England interest-rate rises that are forcing rents and mortgages through the roof. 

The cause of labour will not advance, here or in France, till we see through the economists’ obfuscation to the class interests behind it.