Hell hath no fury like an environmentalist scorned and Emmanuel Macron has felt a wave of green wrath since his declaration last week that France has gone far enough in pursuit of Net Zero. ‘We are ahead, in regulatory terms, of the Americans, the Chinese and of any other power in the world,’ said Macron in a speech at the Élysée. ‘We must not make any new changes to the rules, because we will lose all the players,’ he continued.

Calling for a ‘pause’ of more EU environmental red tape, Macron said member states required stability if they were to attract future investment.

One could argue that 21st century western workers are being exploited by the powerful and aggressive environmental lobby

A day later, the president doubled down on his remarks while on a visit to Europe’s leading steel producer in Dunkirk. ‘I prefer factories that respect our European standards, which are the best, rather than those who want to add more and more standards, but without having any more factories,’ declared Macron.

There was a reason Macron chose Dunkirk. It is Marine Le Pen territory, a region where unemployment is at 9 per cent, 2 per cent more than the national average. ‘The Dunkirk basin has lost 6,000 industrial jobs in 20 years,’ acknowledged the president. ‘We will recreate 16,000 by 2030.’

The steel workers approved of what they heard, and so do many on the centre-right. An online poll by Le Figaro received 160,000 respondents in the first 24 hours, 70 per cent of whom agreed with their president that there is too much bureaucratic green tape.

But from the left there has been only rage. ‘Absolutely irresponsible’ cried the Green MP Sandrine Rousseau, who said it wasn’t fewer environmental regulations that were needed: ‘On the contrary, we have to increase them.’

Her party colleague Sandra Regol levelled that most damning of accusations at Macron, that of ‘climate denial’, adding that he was ‘taking France back to the 1980s’.

The far-left France Insoumise were also outraged. ‘It’s not as if there’s a [climate] emergency’, tweeted a sardonic Damien Maudet. One of the party’s MEPs, Manon Aubry, thundered that Macron ‘is now using the same rhetoric, word for word, as the European right and far right, who want to kill the implementation of the rest of the European climate package’.

Curiously, the hard left trade union, CGT, which has been at the forefront of this year’s pension reform protests, joined the chorus of disapproval at the president’s declaration. ‘We are not going to sacrifice the environmental issue to the economic issue,’ said Sophie Binet, the CGT secretary general. ‘It’s extremely serious to do that.’

That statement is curious because the CGT was established at the end of the 19th century to, in the words of its charter, defend workers’ rights in the ‘class struggle’ against exploitative bosses. One could argue that 21st century western workers are being exploited by the powerful and aggressive environmental lobby, which imposes regulation after regulation to the detriment of industry and prosperity.

But the CGT is no longer an organisation that battles on behalf of blue-collar workers; like most trade unions and left-wing political parties in Britain and France, it has been captured by the progressive managerial class. A generation ago the leader of the CGT was a man who was an apprentice railwayman at 15; now it’s led by someone who read philosophy at university.

The CGT seems more interested in social justice – marching in the cause of ‘Islamophobia’, the environment and LGBTQ rights – rather than striving to support those suffering the effects of deindustrialisation. This dereliction of duty might explain why the membership of the CGT has declined so dramatically in the last 20 years.

At the same time that the CGT and the French Socialists have been shedding supporters, Marine Le Pen has been attracting followers, many of them blue-collar workers who once voted left. Her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, founded the National Front in 1972, growing it from a fringe party to one that reached the second round of the 2002 presidential election by latching onto the two preoccupations of the working-class: immigration and deindustrialisation.

In a 2005 speech Le Pen urged his supporters to vote ‘No’ in the impending referendum on the EU Constitution. He blamed Europe, as much as the French elite, for the fact that in 30 years the number of people employed in the industrial sector had fallen from six to three million. ‘Unemployment has taken hold in a structural manner, born of deindustrialisation and the drastic reduction in the number of people working in agriculture, trade and crafts,’ said Le Pen.

This same sense of grievance accounted for the success in April of the newly-formed Farmer Citizen Movement in the Dutch regional elections. As Eva Vlaardingerbroek wrote in the Spectator, the Movement had tapped into the ‘larger conflict between the authoritarian green agenda being pushed by our government and the silent majority paying for it all’.

If the French establishment wants to avoid their nightmare scenario of a Marine Le Pen presidency in 2027 they will do so only by addressing mass immigration and deindustrialisation. Ignoring these issues, while foisting on the public an authoritarian green agenda, will ensure Le Pen becomes the first female leader of the Fifth Republic.

Macron appears to be getting the message, though one can never be sure with Monsieur ‘En Meme Temps’ [At the Same Time]. There is a reason why he’s acquired that nickname among his opponents: he has a habit of saying or doing one thing and the next week the exact opposite.

Last year Macron relaunched France’s nuclear industry – just as Germany closed the last of its reactors – and in the next decade or so six new reactors will be built and 100,000 jobs created. Apprentice schemes are coming back into fashion, providing opportunities for young men and women of different classes and ethnicities.

When the nuclear energy bill was presented to parliament in March this year it passed without problem; the centre-right Republicans supported it, so too Marine Le Pen’s National Rally and the Communists. The Greens, the Socialists and La France Insoumise all voted against.

The truth is that Net Zero has become a bourgeois cult, and their self-absorbed domineering has been tolerated for too long.

As the Yellow Vests told the environmental lobby as they took to the streets in 2018 to protest against a green fuel tax: ‘You talk about the end of the world while we are talking about the end of the month.’