French Form Anti-Tunnel Organisation

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 986, 31 May 1930, Page 10

French Form Anti-Tunnel Organisation

Channel Tube Opposed “BENEFIT TO BRITAIN" While the project of a channel tunnel was formerly almost exclusively championed by France and opposed by Britain, mainly on the grounds of military considerations, the roles seem about to be reversed now that a technical commission in France, charged with an examination of the question, has pronounced in its favour. Opposition in France has been crystallised with the formation of an organisation composed of prominent citizens belonging to all parties. Henri Moreau, a foremost expert on colonial and maritime economy, heads the movement against the tunnel.

M. Moreau and his colleagues of the Anti-Tunnel Association put up as their principal objection against the realisation of the project that France does not need the tunnel. They say that, while a tunnel would link Britain with the entire European Continent, it would link France only with Britain. “The sinking of four thousand million francs, which is the financial quota to be furnished by French capital, merely to shorten the distance from Paris to London, is fantastic,” they say. “All we are to get for the money, the figures of which are beginning to assume astronomical dimensions, is a double-truck railway. The sea, which is more generous, offers us a dozen or a hundred tracks free of charge.” In answering the question as to what the principal object of a channel tunnel would be, for the construction of which France is expected to pay half the expense, th’e French opponents of the scheme declare: “The object is for Britain to link herself with the entire Continent. France, on the other hand, will benefit only to the extent of being linked with Britain alone. Paris is already linked by rail to every centre of importance in Europe. With the tunnel under the channel a reality, Britain achieves in one blow what it took France to accomplish at the cost of many long years of arduous achievement and immense outlays of capital. Moreover, Britain will have half her expense paid by others in the bargain,” M. Moreau and tha other antitunnellers have otha? objections, equally well founded on the face of it, which indicate that there is to be a lot of palavering and bickering before the first shovel starts to dig away in the chalky soil. “Britain,” says M. Moreau, speaking of behalf of hie followers, “is about to launch a desperate move to rehabilitate her wanir g commerce and industry. The channel tunnel would make England the pivot of commerce for the entire world, the railhead of the Continent. To obviate transhipment, everything coming from Eastern Europe would go through the tunnel for embarkation at some English port. And, vice versa, American commerce coming eastward would more and more come to regard British ports as the maritime terminus. Britain's ports would revive, and French ports would be ruined.” “Before building the tunnel, the French people ought to ask themselves if they are really willing to sacrifice the prosperity of Havre, Boulogne, Dunkirk, St. Nazaire, and many other harbours,” says the Antl-Tunnellers’ Manifesto. “It is well known that tourists linger as long as they can on the Continent,” M. Moreau adds to his argument, “before taking the boat back to America. It is obvious that they would embark at some English port if the tunnel existed, for this would give them an additional day on tho Continent. In time the English i ports would become the usual point I for transatlantic embarkation, and i French embarkation an exception.”