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Labour’s Maginot Line Moment
The debate on Heathrow expansion showed a staggering ignorance of the real battle facing our society

IT WAS one of the biggest infrastructure projects in human history.

For much of the 1930s, and at a cost of 3.3 billion francs, France built itself a 900-mile network of tunnels, underground bunkers and concrete gun batteries along much of the Franco-German border. The intention was to protect France from any repeated World War I-style German invasion.

This was the Maginot Line, a colossal (but ultimately futile) piece of engineering the Germans simply bypassed in the war that followed.

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