"The place I am thinking of has sensational food, and sunshine and clean hospitals and trains that can travel at 357 mph and waiters with a far better command of English than you can find in London. Yes, my friends, I am taking us to France, and the lands that used to be English, and that could be English once more - or more English than they are now.
In his Histoire d'Angleterre, André Maurois points out that the Seine and the Thames used both to be tributaries of the same great primaeval river, and that it was only in the past 8,000 years - a twinkling - that the melting glaciers turned that river into the Channel. Well, I say it is time we forded that river again; it is time for another fixed link across our national moat. Because, in spite of our existing rail link, the Channel is serving to pen in the English, and to push up our house prices, and to prevent us from spilling naturally back into Artois and Normandy and Aquitaine and all the other bits of France that we held, one way or another, until we lost Calais in 1558.
In one sense, the economic arguments are overwhelming. The population density in southern England is about four times greater than much of northern France; and the central point is that our house prices, by comparison with those in France, are therefore demented. We have a position in which millions of desperate consumers are separated from the commodities they need by a paltry stretch of water, and in their desperation they are preparing to carve into what is left of the southern English countryside..."
He is proposing a road link.via No Pasaran
1 comment:
There's nothing wrong with France -save the French.
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