CHRISTCHURCH council is like Britain in the Second World War in opposing the merger plan, a councillor has said.

Cllr Denise Jones made the analogy at an extraordinary full council meeting on Tuesday, held to discuss the borough’s response to Government approval of the Future Dorset plan, which will see Christchurch, Bournemouth and Poole come under one authority.

The council, which voted to seek further legal advice to challenge the plan, is split on the issue.

“Churchill is very much in the news at the moment, and unlike most of my colleagues I don’t write out my speeches in advance, I speak from the heart,” Cllr Jones told the Echo.

“It struck me that we are on our own just like England was in 1940, and if we followed the spirit of what some then advocated we would just lie down and surrender.

“Britain decided that we would continue to fight even though the rest of Europe had capitulated. We had the determination to fight for what we believed in.”

Cllr Jones is a former history teacher and became one of the youngest heads of history in the country when she was appointed to Elmslie Girls’ School in Blackpool at the age of 24, after studying at Liverpool University.

She denied referring to any colleagues as “appeasers”, although her husband and fellow Tory councillor David Jones said he had suggested then-Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 claim to have secured “peace for our time”, following a meeting with Hitler in Munich, showed how Conservative councillors and MPs could have good reason to oppose a Tory Government.

“If the Conservative MPs at the time had supported the Prime Minister we would have been conducting last night’s meeting in German,” he said. “There are a long list of things Conservative and Labour Governments have got wrong.”

At the meeting Cllr Ray Nottage, who has backed Future Dorset, said: “What I find hugely offensive is the attempt to humiliate people who have a different view by suggesting that they are part of an appeasement process to Nazi Germany. There’s no comparison, and I find it extraordinarily offensive that fellow councillors should take such a direction.”