Good men, doing nothing

 Some people ask why I comment on "wrongs" that don't directly affect me. The answer's here ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...

First they came for the Communists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me

And there was no one left

To speak out for me

Something wrong still deserves comment, whether you are personally affected or not.

"Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing." (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Stuart_Mill) -  usually presented as "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing".

Me too?

Apparently quite a lot of people are considering standing for Council at next year’s General Election.  Younger people.  People with a vision for how St Helena should be run.  People who, in my (and, I suspect, most of the electorate’s) estimation, would be good Councillors, committed to doing good things for the island.  And I gather there is only one big thing holding them back.

They don’t, in the words of one, want to be “A lone voice in a sea of dickheads”.

They fear that if they stand and are elected, but find themselves on Council with the current “Old Guard” incumbents, they will be bullied and harassed by these dead-heads until they leave, as has happened in recent years to other younger, brighter Councillors.

I understand their fear.  It is an entirely realistic scenario.  It has happened before.

Only if we can get enough of these younger, more competent people to put their names into the ring so that progressive and motivated Councillors can form a majority can we have any hope of electing a more forward-thinking Council, committed to serving the needs of the people of St Helena rather than just doing what the officials tell them to do while feathering their own nests.

(For the avoidance of doubt, I don’t believe all our current councillors to be lazy, incompetent or border-line corrupt).

So how do we get these people to declare themselves so that others with the same motivations can see them and think “Yes, me too...”?

If I knew the answer I would not be asking the question.

(And, also for the avoidance of doubt - - - I’m not one of them.)

Nothing Changes

In 2008, towards the end of the Constitution review process that resulted in our current Constitution, one of the drafting team was asked:

“The changes that are being proposed are by the Governor who wants it in by election time in next year. It hasn't necessarily come from the people.” (St Helena Herald, 21^st Nov. 2008, page 6).

You could ask exactly the same question today. 

And the answer was, basically, that full consultation would take too much time, which is also exactly the answer you would get if you asked this question today.

So they are getting it wrong in 2020 just like they did in 2008!

Impressive (but sadly not surprising).

(For more about the changes needed that are apparently not going to be made see http://sainthelenaisland.info/constitution.htm#changesneeded)

No longer what its name suggests

 

Having some data allowance spare at the end of the month I downloaded pdf versions of all the island newspapers for my archive. 

I don’t buy the “Independent” (as it calls itself, even though it isn’t) but scanning through the pdfs I noticed just how much effort it had put into persuading readers that the recommendations of the “Governance Commission” (the body of people carefully selected by the Governor to tell him to do what he wanted to do anyway) were the right way forward for the island, the best ideas available on the planet and, indeed, the best ideas humanity had ever come up with since climbing down from the trees and standing upright.

Of course, it should be noted that the editor of the “Independent” is also a member of this undemocratic and wholly unrepresentative “Commission”, so I suppose he would agree with its report, wouldn’t he? 

I looked but couldn’t find in any of the articles anywhere where he declared his obvious conflict of interest.  A professional journalist would, of course, have done so, or better still would have refrained from using his newspaper to sell his own work.

I remember the days of old when the Independent (which it then was) took a sceptical approach to Government, challenging it to do better.  No longer so, it seems.

They say people buy a newspaper not to be informed but to have their prejudices confirmed.  That being the case, the people who buy the “Independent” these days must believe that everything our Governor and his government does is wonderful, appropriate and in the best interests of the people of St Helena.

I don’t, because I don’t.

The 1980s comes to St Helena?

 It is sometimes said that St Helena follows the UK, only 40 years behind.  

40 years ago the UK had a new Conservative government that believed that wealth was all that mattered and “society” was no longer a meaningful concept.  They sold off the nations assets and put millions into poverty while a select few got richer. 

It looks to me like much the same is now happening here. 

Certainly our assets –land and fishing – are being sold off to overseas interests.  Someone even said our wind and our sunshine are being sold to PASH who will collect the energy from them and sell it back to us!  And certainly we have a lot of people struggling to make ends meet.  Salaries have risen less than official inflation (and much less than actual price-rises) for some years 

SHAPE, I hear, will get NO money from SHG this year.  Neither will the Community Development Organisation. “Society” is being allowed to fall apart.
 
In the early 1980s there were riots in UK cities.  We have an increase in vandalism.

Tell me this isn’t St Helena’s 1980s?

Mad rush

 Last night I went along to the Jamestown “public engagement” meeting to hear what the Governor’s unrepresentative body had to say about its proposals to change how government works on St Helena.  I have three things to report:

1.       It seems we will soon be invited to vote on whether or not we want “Ministerial Government”, but exactly how that would work has not been fully thought through.  The speakers could not answer many of the audience’s questions and one of them openly stated that he had not read all the detail in the Sarkin report, on which their work is supposedly based.

We are being asked to vote for a vague notion with no idea what the final result will look like.

A bit like being asked to commit irrevocably to buying a house when they can’t tell you what district it’s in, how many bedrooms it has, whether it is on a big plot or a tiny one, etc. etc.

This is not satisfactory.  They should do the work properly and ask us to vote on a real, functional package, not a vague notion, however attractive that notion might be.

2.       It seems to me that this whole process is being rushed through to meet some arbitrary deadline, presumably set by the Governor.  It is NOT necessary that we get this done in time for the 2021 election (probably in July).  It is better to get it right than to do it quickly.  There will be other elections; they can be called at any time.  The current system is not so bad that we have to rush into a quick fix that has not been properly thought through.  Governor Rushbrook may want it all done and dusted during his term so that he can put it on his CV, but I think it’s better that before we make such a radical change to how government works on St Helena we should first take the time to make sure it’s the RIGHT change, and that it will actually work in practice.

Otherwise we may end up, as the saying goes, jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.  As one attendee put it last night “Better the devil we know ....”

3.       When the subject of the Governor’s powers came up it was extremely disappointing to hear the speakers saying that Saints are not yet ready to take control of their own destiny so need a Governor to stay in control and make sure everything is OK.

I strongly reject this defeatist attitude.  Saints, in my opinion, are as capable of controlling their own destiny as any other people in the world.  Yes, perhaps mistakes will be made, but they will be “our” mistakes, as opposed to the mistakes forced upon the people of St Helena by a middle-ranking civil servant appointed to us by London.  Can anyone tell me Governors and other appointees from London have never made mistakes?

We have a Human Right of self-determination. Britain should stop interfering with that right.

Please go along to your local meeting and see if you find the same as I did. For the schedule follow the link below:

https://www.sainthelena.gov.sh/2020/news/governance-commission-programme-of-public-engagement/

St Helena: No Votes

The UK Government frequently criticises countries like China for denying their citizens Democracy and Human Rights.  This is not inaccurate – China does deny its citizens Democracy and Human Rights.  And yet the UK Government is itself doing precisely that – denying the citizens of the British Overseas Territories such as St Helena the basic Human Right of self-determination – Democracy.

Let’s focus on St Helena, but what follows applies equally in many other “OT”s. 

The residents of St Helena (“Saints”) are not allowed to vote in British parliamentary elections for the government that will dictate their fate.  London appoints a Governor, selected by the government for which the Saints cannot vote, and this person has ultimate power over the island, reporting only to the UK Government.  St Helena does have a local democratically-elected Council, but it really has little power – no more than a UK District Council.  The people of St Helena do not have the right of self-determination which, according to the UN is one of the most basic Human Rights.  Saints were not, to give a recent example, allowed to vote on BREXIT; whether Britain remained in or left the EU was decided with no input from the island.

It has been argued that St Helena cannot have Democracy while it is still financially dependent on the UK.  This is a ridiculous argument.  Since when were Human Rights only granted to people who turn in a profit?  If Manchester was running at a loss would its residents lose their right to vote?  What about the isolated Scottish Islands, who are financially dependent – should they lose their democratic rights?  Anyone who suggests that being financially dependent means you lose your right of self-determination has fundamentally misunderstood the basic concept of Human Rights.

Surely before Britain lectures other countries about Democracy and Human Rights it should get its own house in order?  People who live in glass houses ...

So two things need to happen; sooner rather than later.

Firstly Britain needs to find a way to allow the citizens of its overseas territories to vote in UK parliamentary elections and national referendums.  It can’t be that hard – France and Holland both manage it.

Secondly Britain needs to reduce the role of its Governors to a purely ceremonial one, with no political power over their Territories whatsoever, and set up a meaningful legislature with genuine power of self-determination in each of its Overseas Territories.

Only then will Britain’s protests about the behaviour of China, etc. carry any credibility.  Only then will Britain be actually compliant with the United Nations policies it claims to uphold.  Only then will Britain join the 21^st Century, instead of remaining as it is today: a 19^th Century colonial power.

St Helena Explained! - a fantasy?

St Helena Explained!

Sit back and imagine what the answer might be.  Consider this fantasy.....

Why is the FCO so determined that St Helena should not make £millions by becoming a tax haven?  It would be perfectly possible if they’d let us.

Why was any hope of our earning a living by legally growing and legally exporting Cannabis shot down before it could get started?  That could so easily have worked too.

Why was the number of tourists wanting to come here reduced by forcing them to go via Johannesburg – one of the planets more dangerous cities, rather than Cape Town or direct from Europe?

The answer is simple: despite what it says, the FCO does not actually want St Helena to have a viable economy.

Surely, you may think, the FCO would prefer not to have to subsidise the island to the tune of £25m each year?  Surely the FCO would prefer that we did not consume UK taxpayers’ money in this way?  Well actually, no.  The FCO wants us to remain dependent on Britain.

As long as St Helena depends on Britain for our living we cannot act independently.  We cannot decide things for ourselves because we still need the subsidy and if we do something the FCO doesn’t like they simply cut off the money.

Fantasy?  Why would the FCO spend so much on controlling just 4,600 people?  Well there is an answer to that too....

Why did the Tory (led) Government in 2011 decide to build St Helena an airport?  Spending £300m on ‘foreigners’ is not a very Tory thing to do.  There was nothing in it for the British companies that donate money to the Tory Party.  Even the construction wasn’t awarded to a British company.  So why do it?  The official answer – to “help us develop an economy so we can get out of dependency” – was so clearly a lie it’s surprising everybody managed to keep a straight face while trotting it out.

There is only one reason why the Tories would spend £300m without any chance of economic kickbacks – the military.

It has been officially denied (frequently) that the UK Government wants to use our airport for military purposes.  In fact it has been said so frequently that the denial must be untrue.  Everybody knows that during the Falklands War the Americans would not allow the airbase on Ascension to be used by the RAF in fighting the war.  Although Ascension is British Territory, the airbase there was built by the Americans using American money, so they own it and they get to say who uses it and for what. 

Back in 2011 there was a real possibility that usable quantities of oil were about to be discovered in the sea around the Falklands.  That would have caused the Argentinean Government to redouble its efforts to reclaim what they maintain is their territory.  The possibility of a “Falklands War II” was looming and Britain could not rely on another sea-based task force to beat off a renewed Argentinean attack (it only just worked in 1982).  An airbase within operational range of the Falklands was needed as quickly as possible. 

Ascension was out – two airbases on one tiny island was unthinkable.  Tristan da Cunha couldn’t support an airport and, in any case, would be out of range for aircraft coming from the UK.  It had to be St Helena.

Of course the UK Government did not want to show its hand so the story about helping our economy was made up and put out.  Some people believed it.  St Helena wasn’t going to say “hey, wait a minute...” because, whatever the secret reasons, we were going to get an airport which meant easier travel and faster medical evacuations.  It was not in St Helena’s interest to question the motives.  The British Labour Party was in disarray; the Liberal Democrats were supporting the Tories.  Nobody questioned it.

Was our airport deliberately mis-designed so that the type of planes we would need to actually develop an economy would not be able to land here?  This is possible, though doing so would require rather more skill that is usually evidenced in UK Government planning.  That may just have been what they call a “happy accident”.

Britain needs to keep St Helena dependent on London so that we don’t take their airbase away from them.  If we became economically independent, then maybe we’d seek to become more politically independent too.  Maybe if oil was actually discovered somewhere near the Falklands and Britain needed our airbase to defend against another Argentinean invasion, St Helena might say “no”.  Better not risk it.

The £25m a year it costs the UK Taxpayer to maintain us is tiny in proportion to the revenues British Tory-supporting companies would make from exploiting Falklands oil, so it can be written off like the premium on an insurance policy.  It’s also probably far less than the UK Government wastes through incompetence and mismanagement in a single week.

All we have to wait for now is for someone in London to “have the idea” of using our airport for military purposes.

So there it is: St Helena explained.  A nice little fantasy.  Maybe it’s even true....

Trees and Progress

Image from http://sainthelenaisland.info/dofe.htm 

There are quite a few trees in Jamestown, improving the appearance of town. We don’t get pronounced seasons, as do places further from the Equator, so there isn’t really an Autumn (“Fall”) when the trees shed all their leaves in preparation for Winter.  Trees lose leaves as and when they need replacing, throughout the year, so they are dropping leaves continually at all times.

Fallen leaves are fine in a forest – they fertilise the ground – but in town they are a nuisance, building up into piles of rotting foliage and blocking pathways, roads and drains.  So the job of leaf-sweeper here is not a seasonal one – it must be done throughout the year at intervals of just a few weeks.

“In the before days” (that’s the Saint way of saying “in the past”), a couple of chaps would turn up with brooms.  They would merrily chat with each other and with passers-by, and sometimes even sang as they worked, accompanied by the gently swish of stiff broom on concrete.  It took a couple of hours to do an area and was not an intrusive process.  But now it has been modernised.

Today a single chap does the job, equipped with a “leaf blower”.  In case you haven’t seen one, this is a petrol-powered engine driving a fan, and the idea is that you use the stream of air generated by the fan to blow the fallen leaves into a pile so that they are easier to shovel onto the cart for disposal.

There are, however, some issues with this.

Firstly a petrol-powered device is inherently more damaging to the environment than a couple of chaps with brooms, consuming scarce natural resources and generating various pollutants.

Secondly the process seems to take a great deal longer than the manual method – at least four and maybe up to six hours to clear a patch previously cleared in two.

Thirdly the machine makers a great deal of noise.  When the leaf-blower is operating in the Duke of Edinburg Playground it is actually necessary in my adjacent home to turn up the radio, television or whatever to hear it over the noise, which seems to run almost continuously for the whole morning, starting at 7am.

Lastly I feel sorry for the poor operator.  Because of the noise he (it’s always a he) is required to wear ear-defenders and because the direction the leaves may take is somewhat unpredictable he must wear a face-protecting visor too.  This makes interacting with anybody else impossible.  So instead of friendly companionship and maybe a cheery song he must operate isolated in a screened bubble, entirely alone.

Clearly, this is progress.  What puzzles me is who benefits from it?

DOCKIES

Because SURE can't figure out how to re-connect to the BBC World Service, we now get the BBC TV News - audio only - on the SAMS Radio 2 channel.

Apart from the fact that much of the time the programmes - designed, of course, for a visual medium - make no sense in sound-only mode, we also get the South African adverts, which introduced me to this new word.

I'm assuming that a "dockie" (I've only heard it said so I'm guessing at the spelling) is what normal sane and literate people call a "documentary". Apparently five syllables is too much for the millennium generation so it had to be abbreviated and "dockie" was the result.

Properly produced documentaries (by which I exclude almost all those produced by American television) require concentration and considered thought and it strikes me that anyone illiterate enough to refer to a documentary as a "dockie" is probably not capable of actually understanding one anyway, so the word is redundant.

Doing myself out of a job

Someone asked me via social media “If you were made Governor of St Helena, what would you do?”

Interesting question!

There is, of course, rather less likelihood of this happening than on my becoming the next President of the United States or the first human to land on Mars, but it is entertaining to consider the answer.

Except that it took me fewer than ten seconds to come up with my response:

“Abolish the role and replace it with a leader democratically elected by the people of St Helena.”

In general, the post of Governor dates back to the 17^th Century.  A colonial power invaded someone else’s land and set up a Governor to rule over the newly-subjugated people.  The latter had no say in the matter and if they tried to express a contrary view they were treated as rebels and executed by the military.  There was no self-determination, no democracy and no freedom of speech.

Taking a pertinent example, St Helena’s first Governor was John Dutton who was sent out in 1659 with a bunch of colonists and a small military contingent to “settle” the island.  There were no inhabitants to subdue, so the colonists – who presumably volunteered – seem to have happily accepted Dutton’s near-feudal rule over them.  But this did not last.  Only two Governors later, Richard Coney (March 1671 - August 1672) was “Seized by rebellious members of the island’s council and shipped back to England”[1].  Sadly this minor revolution did not establish a democracy and a new Governor arrived in the next ship from England.

In fact, St Helena did not get any form of democracy whatsoever until ---- can you guess?  The 1800s?  Wrong!  The 1920s?  Wrong!  The late 1940s in the social reforms after World War 2?  Wrong again.  St Helenians were not allowed to vote on anything at all until as late as 1963, and this was only to appoint members of an “Advisory Council”, which could express an opinion to the Governor but which he could choose to completely ignore.

It was not until the 2009 Constitution that the role of the Governor was pared back so that he was obliged both to listen to and act in accordance with the wishes of a democratically elected council, and even then there were so many caveats and special circumstances, some quite loosely worded, that the Governor can still, to this day, do more or less as s/he pleases.  He also controls the Police.

This is a complete nonsense in the 20^th year of the 21^st century.  It ranks the effectiveness of St Helenian democracy in line with how it is practiced in China and North Korea, and somewhat behind Iran.

Now we are going to get a new Constitution and our current Governor seems to think it is solely up to him to decide what’s in it.  He has himself picked (with no published criteria) a group of people to advise him, but there is no indication that the people of St Helena as a whole will be involved in the process and it is not even clear that the island will get to vote on whether the resulting Constitution is implemented.

A Constitution should be “an agreement between a people and their Government about how they want to be governed”, but apparently even in 2020 this does not apply to St Helena.

So, yes, in the once-in-a-sky-blue-pink-with-purple-dots-moon chance that I am made Governor of St Helena, I would almost immediately make myself redundant, to be replaced with a democratically elected leader, supported by a democratically elected council.

“Almost immediately”?

Well before I sacked myself I’d also bring in effective Freedom of Information legislation and a workable Data Protection Ordinance to secure the new democracy I was about to establish.

If anyone from the Foreign and Colonial (sorry, ‘Commonwealth’) Office wants to interview me for the post they can find my contact detail on this blog.  I won’t hold my breath ....

---

[1] http://sainthelenaisland.info/governor.htm#gov003

Twelve becomes six, becomes one?

There should be a General Election here next year. I'm wondering - how many seats will we be voting for? Now that ExCo has granted itself power to ignore what the other seven councillors think (yesterday's Sentinel, p9 and also see Cyril Leo's letter p2) maybe we will be voting for ExCo members only with LegCo being disbanded? What now is the point of LegCo? The committee system that has been bypassed was slow and tedious, and certainly doing away with LegCo would speed up the process of getting decisions made and Ordinances passed, if speed and efficiency is the primary objective. But if so, why stop there? To further increase speed and efficiency why have elected representatives at all? The fastest and most efficient way to take decisions is to vest all power in a single individual – the Governor – and stop all this slow and tedious Democracy all together. Think of the money we would save! Imagine how speedy and efficient decision making would be! And the $64bn question is: how much difference would that actually make? Frighteningly little, I suspect. Already our Governor apparently has ExCo doing his bidding. I can’t remember the last time I heard of the Governor proposing something that ExCo rejected. Allow dubious investors to buy up vast tracts of St Helena for their doubtful projects? OK. Destroy fisheries and sell off the fishing rights to people overseas with local groups being officially excluded from the process? Also OK. So if LegCo has been muted and ExCo is no longer challenging what the Governor demands, we really don’t have a democracy here already. Recognising that (and saving a whole ton of money in the process and also improving speed and efficiency) has got to be the obvious next step. St Helena managed without democracy for over 300 years, from colonisation in 1659 until 1963. Should we declare the democratic experiment a waste of resources and consign it to history? I’m sure our councillors can find other jobs. Maybe they could start fishing .....

ERODING OUR DEMOCRACY

ERODING OUR DEMOCRACY

Remember the “ExCo Report”?  Instigated by Governor Gurr to improve democracy, after every ExCo meeting he gave a report of what was discussed and what was decided.

Anybody want to guess when we last had an ExCo Report?

This year there has been not one single ExCo report.  Zero.  The last was after the meeting on 12^th November 2019, and that was only seven paragraphs. Gov. Gurr’s reports sometimes filled two pages of the newspaper.

All we get now is a brief press release summarising the open agenda.  There is no official report of what was agreed.

Given the ExCo recently gave itself the power to make decisions alone, completely bypassing the LegCo Committee Stage, it is now more important than ever that we are told what ExCo is deciding.

Clearly telling the people what their governing body has been up to is no longer a priority.

For the people, BY THE PEOPLE

The consultant Jeremy Sarkin has proposed changes to how democracy works on St Helena.  The Governor says he needs advice on how Saints will feel about these changes, so a body has been set up to advise the Governor.

So far, so good, but how were the members of this body selected?  By public ballot, showing that they are representatives of the people?  No - they were hand picked to serve by the Governor himself.

Does anyone smell a rat?  The Governor will be advised by a bunch of people he himself chose for the role?

Is this a taste of how “democracy” is now to be done on St Helena?

I have nothing personal against the individuals selected but they are not – and cannot be – representatives of the people.  The people can only be represented by people they CHOOSE to represent them.  That is the foundation stone of Democracy.

Fortunately this selected body does not have the final say.  There will have to be a vote of the people before any changes can be made. So I suggest Saints completely ignore what it and the FCO/Governor decide and form an independent view on whether the proposed changes will or will not improve democracy on St Helena, and then vote accordingly.

(Details of the “advisory body” are in yesterday’s (14th May) Sentinel http://www.sams.sh .)

Offline

I used to commute into London by train.  I could have driven but it would have involved getting up more than an hour earlier and parking in London was expensive (and that was in the days before congestion charging added to the bill).  So every morning I arrived at Harpenden station in time for the 07:22 train to London.

Most mornings the train was late – I could probably count on the fingers of one finger the times it was on time – but usually only by a few minutes.  Allowing for further delays along the way I usually got to work sometime between 08:30 and 08:45.

Except that some mornings it was much more seriously delayed.  “Leaves on the line”, “the wrong kind of snow”, “points failure in outer Mongolia”, “train driver abducted by aliens”, the excuses were repeated continuously over the barely-intelligible announcements system.  We got as bored listening to them as doubtless did the poor guy who was paid to keep repeating them.  Nobody, it seems, knew when the problem would be fixed.  There was no estimate available for when our train would arrive and depart.

And to this day I remember that horrendous, deep-gut feeling of utter powerless.  There was no action I could take.  By that time in the morning if I were to give up, get into my car and attempt to drive in I would be unlikely to arrive at my desk before lunchtime.  I had meetings to attend, emails to receive and respond to, papers to read and write, but I could do none of these because of a fire in Basingstoke, or some such, and – most frustrating of all – nobody could tell me how long I would be waiting there.

So the only thing I could do was to stand there and wait, trying to resist the temptation to scream in frustration and kick the timetable board, hoping that somebody would fix whatever problem it was that was delaying our train.  Even if it wasn’t raining (100 commuters – 5mx4m waiting room) I remember those times as some of the most miserable of my life.

I was reminded of them this morning by today’s island-wide Internet failure.

I have, on my PC, 10 emails waiting to be sent, some urgent.  I have things I want – need - to do online.  I can do none of this.  I can’t even check Facebook to see what my friends had for breakfast and who has praised Trump for his masterly handling of the Covid-19 crisis.  I am sat here waiting for somebody to identify and fix the problem and reconnect St Helena to the outside world and I can do absolutely nothing to help make that happen.

On the bright side, I can at least make myself a cup of tea while I’m waiting, and I’m not getting wet or snowed-on, but the frustration at my powerless to improve my situation remains.

If St Helena does have to go on Lockdown due to Covid-19 I fear that our Internet system will not be able to provide the lifeline that has helped every other country to survive.  How will we cope?

Coronavirus measures

In order to prevent infection by the Coronavirus, St Helena is now closed until July. No flights. No cruise ships. No supply ships. No yachts. No air-drops (which might contain infected air). We have teams deployed on the shore to push any floating rubbish that may contain infected air back out to sea and we're also building a big fan to blow the wind back out to sea in case it carries the virus from South Africa. Were building a big tent over the island to deflect potentially-infected rain.

Sadly, no ships means no fuel, of course, so no power - we'll have to shut down all the electronics - hence this will be my last posting.

Goodbye cruel world!

(Is that a suitable non-panicky response?)

Andrew, on BREXIT

My eldest son, Andrew, posted the following this morning on Facebook™.  It so eloquently says what I could not have expressed better myself.

Growing up in many ways I was proud to be British. I looked at my nation as being progressive and, although far from perfect, a generally sensible nation with gun control, healthcare and many things other countries haven’t got right yet.

I looked at Britain as one of the great unifiers; a founder of Europe, the commonwealth and other groups that were going to bring the world together.

That Britain died yesterday. It had been sick for a long time, but is now truly dead.

From today onwards, Britain is no longer a part of building a better world; it has become isolationist, caught up in its own ridiculous feeling of self importance and backward.

Britain now reminds me, not of a proud nation, but of the stereotypical town drunk who sits in the corner of the bar trying to tell stories of his glory days to anyone who might listen.

I know Brexit was “the will of the people” but frankly the people were wrong, the people were lied to and in the end, sadly it is the people, both those who wanted Brexit and those who didn’t, who will now have to suffer the long hard days ahead.

To the old Britain: may she rest in peace. To the new Britain and all of us in the OTs who are dragged along this path, I wish us all good luck – the real work begins now

Be careful what you wish for ....

A lot of nations have experienced the same thing.  In the midst of all the celebrations of their newly-gained Independence someone suddenly realises that they have also lost something – a very important something: someone to blame.

When you leave home you can no longer blame your parents for holding you back.  It’s now all down to you.  The successes are your successes but the failures are also unequivocally yours.  And when a country becomes independent it can no longer blame “the colonial masters” for all the country’s ills.  It has to take responsibility for its own failures.

For many years the BREXITeers have been delighting in blaming the EU for everything that is wrong in Britain and convincing a gullible public that once Britain leaves the EU all the problems will go away and Britain will become a land flowing with milk and honey.

Now they have to deliver on that vision.

“Be careful what you wish for .... you may get it!”

I call "bullshit"

In yesterday’s newspaper SURE paid for a two-page advertisement which basically told the people how wonderful SURE is and how committed it is to serving the people of St Helena.

As the phrase goes, “I call bullshit”.

Imagine a visitor who arrives at the Airport on a Saturday. His friend is not there to pick him up and he doesn’t have his friend’s number, so he calls Directory Enquiries and hears a recorded message saying that the service is only available from 8am to 4pm, Mondays to Fridays (excepting public holidays).

This being St Helena, of course, he does not have to wait for his friend to remember him, or the 43 hours until SURE next operates, he just asks somebody for help and probably ends up getting a free lift to his friend’s place – but that is not the point.  Our visitor’s first impression of St Helena is that it makes a 3^rd world country look sophisticated.

If your Internet fails or your telephone goes crackly at 2pm on a Saturday you cannot even report the fault until 8am on Monday (or Tuesday of Monday is a public holiday).  In the “real world” two days without Internet access would be considered a crime – here it is a fact of life, often experienced.

I could site many other examples.

If SURE wants the people of St Helena to believe it is committed to improving their lives it should start by providing a reasonable standard of service at the times when it is required (which is, by the way, 24/7).

(PS I am well aware that, as a result of my posting this, my telephone/Internet will mysteriously develop a fault at about 2pm tomorrow.  That’s the price I must pay for telling the truth.)

United Nations & St Helena

Our Equality & Human Rights Commission ("SHEHRC") has made its first submission to the United Nations regarding Human Rights on St Helena, which makes interesting reading!

The submission is part of an update on the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the document can be read at https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/Treaties/CCPR/Shared%20Documents/GBR/INT_CCPR_IFS_GBR_41059_E.pdf (other submissions are indexed here: https://tbinternet.ohchr.org/_layouts/15/treatybodyexternal/SessionDetails1.aspx?SessionID=1371&Lang=en).

The SHEHRC's submission concludes .....

Two issues stand head and shoulders above the rest when it comes to addressing human rights issues within St Helena and affect the SHEHRC’s ability to achieve real progress. They are:

1. The Territory’s restricted ability to exercise its right to self-determination including to report directly to the UN, vote on significant matters like “Brexit” or indeed take part in the elections for the Government that decides its future.

2. The very unclear relationship between the UK Government (UKG) and SHG with regard to responsibility for protecting human rights. Although UKG has supported the development of human rights laws and policies in its St Helena, including the addition of a Bill of Rights section in our Constitution, it has not codified its own responsibility for human rights on the island.

If transparency on these issues can be achieved the path for reporting and resolving the SHEHRC’s concerns will be clearer and it will be more likely that the human rights concerns on the island will be understood and resolved.

It's a great shame that Sir Simon McDonald did not take the time to meet with the SHEHRC during his recent visit. He and they could have had an interesting discussion about this!

It will be interesting to see what the UN thinks about the UK Governments treatment of its ‘colonies’.