Eurocrats Want To Rename Channel

BRITANNIA looks like being forced to give up her place as ruler of our waves …to Brussels.

Barking mad eurocrats want to ­rename the English Channel the ­“Anglo-French Pond”.

Under a Government-backed scheme, bankrolled by British taxpayers, officials have been working on breaking down national barriers by creating new regions for Europe.

Under the plan, a vast swathe of southern England was joined to western Belgium and northern France in 2003 to become the Arc Manche ­region of Europe.

With the first map of the region ­being drawn up, the divide between the countries is being played down by giving the Channel a new name.

Documents seen by the Sunday ­Express reveal that the Department for Communities and Local Government is backing the downgrade.

The Channel was named the Oceanus Britannicus by the geographer Ptolemy in the second century AD.

Yet more than £1.1million of taxpayers’ cash is being used to erase it from maps that will be sent to schools across the south of England.

Caroline Spelman, Shadow Secretary of State for Communities and ­Local Government, said: “British ­taxpayers’ money is being used literally to wipe our nation off the map, erase a thousand years of history and downgrade the English Channel to the insulting status of a ‘pond’.

“Hard-working families and pensioners will be outraged to see Gordon Brown’s department that has been ­responsible for a doubling of their council tax is wasting their cash on this propaganda.

“A Conservative government will scrap these euro plans and save the English Channel.”

The Arc Manche Region stretches from Cornwall to Kent and from Nantes to Lille. Its capital is Paris. It has its own government and its own president, French socialist Alain Le Vern.

The scheme is part of propaganda to promote the European Union, whose flag will fly at events designed to raise awareness of the region.

Documents drawn up to bid for ­British funding for what is called the Espace Manche Development Initiative reveal the drive towards “increased European integration” which has prompted the idea of an Anglo-French “pond”.

They state: “The channel has become a zone of multiple interacting and overlapping activities.

“It is a shared space, a small Anglo-French internal sea; the interplay of activities both on and around what has become known as the Anglo-French Pond.”

Documents explaining the project boast: “A 1,000-year period, beginning with the Norman invasion of England, now nears its end as that same island becomes physically linked to the ­continent of Europe.”

The bidding document, however, ­reveals that while the region has been in existence for seven years it has failed to fire the public imagination.

It admits: “This theatre of transnational co-operation is still far from ­being established in the minds of the inhabitants of the regions and counties on either side.”

The new map is designed to ­“contribute to increasing knowledge and promoting a cultural identification with this transfrontier region”.

Western Britain has been lumped in with parts of France, Spain and Portugal to form the Atlantic region.

Eastern Britain has been made part of the North Sea region, with parts of Sweden, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Norway.

Most of Scotland has been reworked as the Northern Periphery, joining parts of Norway, Greenland, Iceland and Finland.

The Department for Communities and Local Government has described the project as a way of promoting ­economic development .

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