And so a small problem became a large tragedy. Thirteen hundred men died, hundreds more were maimed, thousands of millions of pounds were expended in an unnecessary war over a piece of territory whose only function was as a symbol of power and strength, and had no intrinsic use at all. ‘Like two bald men fighting over a comb,’ Jorge Luis Borges remarked sardonically when it was all over. ‘When will our country realise,’ said Robin Renwick, the then Counsellor at our Embassy in Washington, ‘that we have a duty to solve our old Imperial problems before tackling those in which we have no direct role? There are more problems than the Falklands out there—and yet we see ourselves as primarily concerned with mediating between Moscow and Washington, or dealing with the Lebanese situation. More attention to the problems that beset us directly might head off such things as the Falklands war.’
In almost every territory I visited there was some stark indication that the mother-country had neither the time nor the energy to waste on correcting an irritation, righting a wrong, recognising an ominous trend, bowing to a subtle need. The Cayman Islands, for instance, was gaining a fearful reputation as a place for ‘laundering’ money from highly questionable sources—did the country that gave us the Bank of England and the highest standards of fiscal propriety care if one of her distant Caribbean colonies became a loose cannon on the decks of the world money markets? It did not—it neither cared, nor cared to interfere. The Turks and Caicos Islands now have a reputation as one of the region’s major centres for drug smuggling—the Chief Minister no less was arrested by the American narcotics authorities a few days after I took tea with him—and yet Britain, a country of supposedly Himalayan moral standards, does no more than emit a benign harrumph! and lets the islands go on their sorry way. In Bermuda there is anxiety as more and more American—and, specifically, American military—influence is brought to bear, and secret plans are announced to station American nuclear weapons on the island in the event of an emergency. The Bermudian people grumble, and make their anxiety known to London—and London does nothing to alleviate their anger or to calm their fears.
We ignore the St Helenians—though we grudgingly pour money into the island economy, priding ourselves on our largesse, while failing to understand that by maintaining the island solely by public handouts we condemn the islanders, who deserve better, to a life stripped of self-respect. We ignore the Pitcairn Islanders, and they drift away on each passing cargo boat, until by the end of the century there are expected to be no Pitcairners left at all, and the colony will, as the Foreign Office would anyway prefer, fade from existence altogether. And we deal—or rather we dealt—with horrifying callousness with the people of the Indian Ocean, when we evicted them from their homes, transported them to a foreign country against their will, and lied and evaded our responsibilities for years before a writer discovered the scandal, and told it to the world. Of all the events of post-Imperial British history, those of the late 1960s that occurred in the archipelago we customarily call Diego Garcia remain the most shabby and the most mean. No excuses can be made, by politicians of any persuasion: Diego Garcia is a monstrous blot on British honour, and shames us all, for ever.
To illustrate the evident lack of caring, or prescience, or sympathetic understanding that too often seems to characterise Britain’s dealings with her final Imperial fragments, consider those few hundred square miles at the northern end of the Leeward Island chain—square miles in which four foreign powers still maintain dependent territories.
There is the island of Ste Martin—Dutch run in the south, under the Netherland Antillean name of Sint Maarten, French run in the north; there are the United States Virgin Islands; and there are the British Virgin Islands. From Washington, Paris, The Hague and from London, four foreign nations try to direct the affairs of the descendants of their former slaves, and with varying degrees of success.
Ste Martin is an overseas department of the French Republic: she is administered by a prefect, she sends deputies to the National Assembly. The laws of France are the laws of Ste Martin. A citoyen of Ste Martin is a citizen of France, able to come and go as he pleases, providing, of course, he can afford the fare. But Air France flights between Paris and the Caribbean departments are well subsidised, and holidays are cheap.
Sint Maarten enjoys much the same privileges as does its neighbour. The laws of Holland apply; the Netherlands Antilles are represented at The Hague; citizenship is mutually exchangeable, regardless of the colour or the background of the particular Dutchman involved.
The United States Virgin Islands are run by a locally elected assembly, with a governor who is elected by the islanders themselves. The territory sends a representative to Congress, though he has no vote. Citizens of the US Virgins are citizens of the USA, and all American federal laws apply in the islands. To all practical intents and purposes, the Virgin Islands are another American state.
But the British Virgin Islands, once a small department of the great colony of the Leeward Islands, seem isolated by more than geography from its mother-country. True, there is a functioning democracy there, and the island runs itself efficiently enough, and without trouble. The Governor—always white, since he is the representative of the Crown—is appointed by London, with no reference made to the islanders’ wishes. There is no Virgin Islands representation in London, save for one small lobbying organisation that carries out public relations and trade relations on behalf of a number of small West Indian states.
The laws of England apply on the Virgin Islands—but not all of them. Capital punishment is still in use, and there is a law permitting public flogging (it is administered by the Chief of Police, usually to youthful miscreants).
Citizens of the Virgin Islands do not enjoy full citizenship of the United Kingdom—they are entitled to some of the consular protection of the Crown, but they may not settle in Britain, and are treated by the immigration authorities with as much, or as little consideration as if they were Iranians, Venezuelans, or citizens of Turkey.
This, above all, seems the greatest insult. There are five and a quarter million people in all the Empire that remains—five million of them in Hong Kong. They have been, and in the main still are, fiercely loyal to England and all for which she stands. They have fought and in many cases have been wounded or have died for her. They fly the Union flag, they worship at the Church of England, they believe themselves immensely fortunate when, on Christmas Day each year, they hear Her Majesty address them all from Buckingham Palace and remind them they are citizens of that splendidly worthy agglomeration of peoples once, or still, ruled by Britain, the Commonwealth. But let them try to come to London to find work, or fly to Manchester to spend time with their relations, or take a holiday in Scotland. Then all the loyalty and the feeling of privilege and good fortune counts for nothing. The law—the British Nationality Act—marks them out as suspect visitors; for the inspectors know full well that the only reason a Montserratian or a Pitcairner or an Anguillian comes to Britain is to settle, and thus become a charge upon the parish; and so the inspector harasses and interrogates and demands this and that, certificates and bank statements and return tickets and marriage licences, far more evidence of some legal reason for the visit than would be asked, one suspects, of an American or a man from Dresden or Valparaiso.
The law applies to all colonial citizens, apart from those in two colonies—Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands. Parliament, which wrote the laws, specifically excluded both groups—25,000 people, all told—and permitted them full right of access to Britain as and when they might want. No logical reason was ever given—indeed, the Falkland Islanders were only given the status after their war—but the inference is obvious. They were given free access because they were white; every other colonial citizen is coloured either black or brown, or yellow.
The stated reason for the Act’s introduction was to prevent the possible tidal wave of five million Hong Kong Chinese into Britain once the agreement with China is finally implemented in 1997. The implie
d secondary reason is to ease the immigration burden posed by tens of thousands of other non-white colonials who might think of arriving in a country already displaying the effects of widespread immigration from the Indies, East and West, in the post-war years. And yet, ironically, it seems very much as though few would-be immigrants actually want to come to Britain to take up their prize. Few Gibraltarians have come, and even fewer from the Falklands. And surveys claim to show that even the St Helenians—most loyal and devoted of all—would come with great reluctance. Of the 6,000 islanders, perhaps 800 would come if the law were changed tomorrow.
But the principle seems an insulting and unkind device, whatever its actual practical results might or might not be. It seems a modest and appropriate reward to all those remaining citizens of Empire, that should they feel they want to come home, they should be permitted so to do. It is the feeling of rejection that is so hurtful to them—and it is a feeling that could be reversed with a change in the law that would have almost no effect, no detrimental effect, at least, upon the welfare of the Britons themselves. The Foreign Office says it will not change the law: Anguillians and Pitcairners and the people of Grand Turk remain foreigners, aliens, for the time being. Only when Hong Kong is safely back in Chinese hands will any minister look at the law again—and it is doubted in Whitehall that it will, in fact, ever be changed. The few thousand remaining colonials are condemned to live for ever denied the small honour of being full citizens of the country that took so much from, and made such use of, the colonies from which they come.
This law aside, there have been some few successes. The Hong Kong agreement was a piece of skilful diplomacy; there seems likely to be some amicable arrangements between Britain and Spain over the future of Gibraltar. For one thing the gates are now open. And it can fairly be said, in the particular case of St Helena, that since 1984, when the Overseas Development Administration took over the day-to-day running of their colony from the Foreign Office, island morale has perked up, there is more optimism than before. Some cynics might suggest this is because ODA is a money-spending arm of the British Government, while the Foreign Office is not; others might suggest that the calibre of people working within the ODA is more suited to the particular needs of small and helpless states, and that there is no attempt by the mandarins at ODA to do more than assist in development—which is all that most colonies want—and no attempt to formulate policy of which, it must be said, there is none currently that relates to the colonies.
But generally, I must conclude that the state of the Empire—that state I thought I might try to divine when first I planned the journeys—is less than ideal. How is the Empire? Were the King to ask, one might fairly reply: ‘Lamentable, Your Majesty,’ and be fairly right. There are exceptions—Hong Kong is one, the Falklands another, Tristan da Cunha, for very peculiar reasons, a third. In the main, though, the tail-end of Empire is an unhappy collection of peoples and places, wanting in imagination, in policy, in a future, in money, in sympathetic administration or talented leaders. Some islands may seek, and win, their independence; others, I fear, will become relentlessly poorer and more morose, trapped by their history, condemned to an eternity of begrudged expenditure, parsimonious direction, second-rate thought and government, to listlessness and ill-fortune. For those, the former glories of that grand assemblage of the British Empire must have a bitter aftertaste today, must trigger the sardonic laugh in the bar, a smirk, and some grim remark about the England of far away and long ago.
There is, I feel, one way out. The idea is not new, and others—notably the French—have tried it with some degree of success.
All the colonies that wish to remain linked to and ruled by the British Crown should continue to be so, as full and integral parts of the United Kingdom, or associated with it in some intimate and constitutionally attractive way. The six West Indian colonies, for example—Bermuda, Anguilla, Montserrat, the Turks and Caicos Islands, the Caymans and the Virgins—could be made into the External British County of the West Atlantic, with their own Member of Parliament (who could sit in the Lords if needs be). The new ‘constituency’ would have a population of some 45,000 people—about the right size for representation at Westminster. The same arrangement could be made for the South Atlantic possessions of Ascension, St Helena, Tristan, the Falklands, the Falklands Dependencies and the British Antarctic. The population would be considerably lower—no more than nine thousand; but the six territories are of a kind, their needs and peoples more similar than separate. (I have long found it odd, for instance, that the BBC has for many years broadcast a regular brief weekend programme to the people of the Falklands—1,800 of them—but has never thought it worthwhile to broadcast to its equally loyal colleagues in St Helena and Tristan, where there are nearly four times as many British subjects. ‘Calling the South Atlantic’ might be a programme well worth considering—the ‘Saints’, certainly, would feel a little less neglected by London were they to hear direct from Bush House every week or so, in the way the Falklanders do now.)
Gibraltar could quite easily be made an External County of the Kingdom, having the population, the proximity and the desire. As for the remainder—sadly it has to be admitted that Pitcairn is too small, British Indian Ocean Territory has no resident population, and Hong Kong is leaving for fresh pastures shortly before the end of the century. For the two first of these, perhaps some Protectorate status—and would it really harm the interests of the British people if all forty-four members of Pitcairn were offered free and permanent access to the United Kingdom, if such they wanted? I rather think not.
Once thus assimilated into the mainland system, the people of the External Counties would be at one with the people of home—the same laws, the same taxes, the same grants, the same rights of access to each other’s territories. A man from Plymouth in Montserrat would enjoy precisely the same rights and freedoms as the man from Plymouth in Devon. A child in Edinburgh-of-the-Seven-Seas would have the same future as the child from Edinburgh on the Forth. And the Common Market could take upon itself the burden of financing some of the less well developed parts of the newly expanded but now truly United Kingdom—a grant for an emergency air strip on St Helena, technical help for the new hospital in Road Town, or a broadcasting station on Anguilla. The arrangement would be tidy, it would be kind, and it would recognise the debt an Imperial power owes to those of its Empire who are, for whatever reason, unable to stand upon their own feet and march into the world alone. For those who want us to stand by, we should do so with enthusiasm, with efficiency and with grace: such a scheme as the French—and, to a lesser extent, the Americans—have found ideal might well work for ourselves. I fervently hope some minister, some day, might champion the cause, rather than leave the old Empire to fade and decay in a way unworthy of our greater traditions.
Since I began these final pages I have left the fine old East India Company desk, and the colony of St Helena, too. I am in a cabin down by the waterline of the little cargo ship that brought me here. I have said my farewells to the island that, of all in the remaining Empire, I feel I have come to know most intimately, the one for which I feel most sympathy, the one I suppose I would say I like above all others.
It is a bright autumn morning, a few minutes before noon. Out at sea there are white horses racing across the wave tops, and in the anchorage a dozen yachts are rolling gaily in the swell. On board our ship there is a silence, pregnant with anticipation.
At noon a bell is struck at the forepeak, and the rumble of the engines shakes the entire vessel. White foam races from the stern, and as the anchors are winched from the seabed, so the ship begins to move forward and into a tight turn to port, out of the anchorage and into open water. The loudspeakers begin to blare their traditionally Imperial farewells: ‘Anchors Aweigh’, ‘Hearts of Oak’, ‘A Life on the Ocean Wave’ and, last of all, ‘Rule Britannia’. Down here the Empire is still alive and well, the memory is the reality, and glorious history is the stuff of the present.
The ship begins to roll in the ocean swell, and then to heave as she comes out of the island’s lee and the winds begin to make their own impression on her superstructure. We have the Governor aboard, and his personal standard flies from the stern mast, cracking in the wind. People are waving. A few are in tears. It will be a long time before the next boat to St Helena, and some in the crowds will not see their friends and children and loved ones for many months, or years, or perhaps ever again. Such is the isolation of this most perfectly preserved Imperial relic.
But soon the watchers turn away. There is no point in prolonging the sadness. The ship is moving fast now, and nothing can stop it. The island is fading into the clouds on the far horizon, her cliffs becoming a little hazy as they plunge into the limitless sea. Soon the island vanishes, to be replaced by a patch of settled grey cloud, and even that fades before long, and the horizon becomes an unbroken line of steel. Before another hour has gone it becomes simple to muse that if there ever were an outpost of the Empire back there, or anywhere, it lingers on only in the memory, and on the maps that no one these days seems to have time to read.
Acknowledgements
‘Not another tropical island!’ they would groan at the Sunday Times, each time I returned, tanned and fit, from one more expedition to an outpost of Empire. In vain would I protest that on this occasion I had been to somewhere cold and windy or had suffered from terrible seasickness. To them all—the Sunday Times editor, Andrew Neil, the foreign editor, Stephen Milligan, his deputy, Cal McCrystal and to Peter Jackson, the editor of the Sunday Times Magazine—I must have seemed to have been on a perpetual holiday, endlessly away from base, writing far less than is customary for a Sunday Times correspondent. I gladly take this opportunity to give them my thanks for their tolerance, forbearance and suppression of envy during my absences and on my returns. And for letting me hang on to my job, through it all.
Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire Page 38