No Region is an Island
Divide and Conquer, the slogan of empires through the ages. Now it becomes the vision of our glorious European future.
A team of cartographers is drawing up a version of the political map of Europe, taking advantage of a proposed Brussels directive. It is feared the directive, which is passing through the European Parliament, could allow a United States of Europe to be created, obliterating the British map.So incredibly people living in much of the East of England, including the North-East and North Yorkshire, would find themselves inhabitants of a North Sea region. Language, culture and history be damned.
Best of all,
Parts of Scotland would become the North Atlantic region with Iceland and northern Scandinavia.
They have obviously chosen to ignore the slight problem that Iceland is not a member of the EU. Can't have reality spoiling the fun.
6 comments:
You know what I love about these stories? No reference whatsoever about what directive they're talking about.
Generally it turns out that that's because the directive in question doesn't say anything like what's being suggested.
That is true. It doesn't however stop people creating projects like this one, ostensibly based on some directive or other that was, at least at the time, supposed to be all about something else.
Like what? That story has no content. It doesn't say what sort of regions they were or to what end. Do you have any other references?
OK I know its hardly unbiased, but The Conservative Party has it on their website.
http://www.conservatives.com/tile.do?def=news.story.page&obj_id=131797
The story also featured in the Daily Express. I heard about such a project about a year ago, but it was from a self-described nationalist source so I took it with a pinch of salt naturally.
It doesn't take me a lot to believe it is a real threat now, however.
This would be a great story if it were true. However, it’s yet another euro-myth. Despite it appearing in The Sun, The Telegraph and The Mail as hard fact (even accompanied by editorials denouncing this evil German Plot and headlines such as The Wolf at the Door, Britain to be wiped off the map etc.) it has no basis in reality.
The origin seems to be a press release from the Conservative Party which mentions a Directive "establishing an infrastructure for spatial information in the Community” which it claims “will forcibly harmonise all maps and geographical information”. It then jumps to “Not only that, but the EU, with John Prescott's help, is trying to establish regions that cross national boundaries, in order to work towards "a United Europe".
What’s the connection between this spatial information Directive and John Prescott or a plan to scrap national borders? I don’t know, I didn’t write this stuff.
What is this Directive about? Scrapping national borders? Redrawing maps? Wiping out Britain? Alas, no. It’s about the less exciting subject of harmonising databases so that information on the effect of human activity on the environment can be shared.
How does this morph into ‘EU Plots to scrap nation States’? Again, your guess is as good as mine.
You’re welcome to read the Directive if you can stay awake long enough. In fact you can follow the entire history of this Directive from 2004 up to date, because, far from being some secret EU conspiracy, it has all been published on the internet. In fact, there is an entire website devoted to it and it has been the subject of a public consultation on the internet, a public hearing, has had a first reading in the European Parliament, been back to the Commission, back to the EP etc. There are newsletters, working groups and many other secret goings-on:
http://inspire.jrc.it
Where the German conspirators come into any of this I don’t know.
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