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....