Daily Express: EU Wants To Merge UK With France

There are certain discourses within the domain of UK journalism which persist despite there being no actual fuel to maintain them. Sometimes the stories that compile these discourses are exaggerated and rehashed versions of prior outrages, used to remind readers of that one time when that bad thing happened and it was touted as 'the end of free speech as we know it' or some other equally ridiculous assertion. But sometimes, the things newspapers write about are quite simply complete bullshit.

You would think that if the EU wanted to merge the UK with France, more newspapers would have seen fit to raise the issue. I think it would be quite a big deal, actually, if Brussels wanted France and the UK to become the same entity. That's what the headline which titles this article implies, right? That the United Kingdom (that's US, in case you didn't know) and France (THEM) are going to become the same thing. A merge. I would think - and correct me if I'm wrong - that other people might have picked up on a story of this magnitude, lest we all awake one morning to a fanfare of the Marseillaise and find our local bakery has been converted into a boulangerie.

The reason that no other paper seems quite as concerned as the Express is simple: it's bullshit.

Of course it's bullshit. The article doesn't even seem to know what it's saying, so I figure the best way to approach it is to pick it apart sentence by sentence, translating the language of imbecile into plain English (ed- or French or European):

FURY erupted(1) last night after a European Union plot to “carve up Britain”(2) by ­setting up(3) a cross-Channel region was exposed(4).

which actually means:

WE FELT A DISPROPORTIONATE AMOUNT OF ANGER(1) last night after we found out(4) that in 1996 the EU created a transnational network(3) called Arc Manche which has had its own Assembly and President since 2005. This one guy said something "quotable"(2).

Actually, I could go on, but I feel it would largely be a waste of time. Once you've debunked the premise of an article as unequivocally and easily as it is possible to do here, there's not much scope for expansion.

One interesting thing that this story does throw up is the way in which people rely on newspapers to get their information, and therefore by ignoring a story as it is initially relevant or bringing it up at a later date after it's been forgotten, rags like the Express can imply that there's some sort of a cover-up involved. Which there isn't. Ever.