Ascension : ‘Private Eye’ ARTICLE ABOUT ASCENSION
Submitted by The Islander (Nathan Prince) 19.04.2007 (Article Archived on 03.05.2007)
No one 25 years ago needed to ask where Ascension was. Television screens mapped daily how the Falklands Task Force was supplied via our volcanic, sub-tropical island home - a mid-Atlantic British territory. For a time, Wideawake Airfield was the world’s busiest airstrip. So how were islanders rewarded for this support?
We were taken for granted as “contract workers”, i.e. on low pay. In the 19th century version of serfdom, the island was run as a ‘company store’ serving a committee of ‘users’ the MoD, the US Air Force, Cable and Wireless, BBC Relay Station and GCHQ. No Ascension representatives were invited to events marking the end of the south Atlantic war, for which we provided key civilian support -including as volunteers on board the Royal Mail ship St Helena. And now we are in crisis. London promised a new future for Ascension but changed its mind. Britain’s democratic values have been shown up as a sham by the Island Councillors, who resigned on 15th March stating that “not only were our hopes misplaced…….. we (were) misled and misinformed at every step of the way”
Reform had began with Labour’s white paper in 1998 called “Partnership for Progress and Prosperity New Relationship with Overseas Territories” Whitehall’s plan for better governance was then set out in 2000 in a document titled “Ascension Island: into the New Millennium” which explained why HMG felt “ the time for change “ had arrived. The British government apparently felt that the civil rights of people living on Ascension must be improved. At present they have no locally elected representation on the Island, no residence rights to lease or own land. “The system was no longer appreciated” and “the users” would prefer to hand over responsibilities for services; Ascension was just by those would live there it would “offer better prospects for enhancing the economics of Ascension and St Helena.
By 2002, change was under way. Taxation was introduced, and then the first Island Council was elected (an order that perhaps reflected whose interest really comes first). The FCO start drafting legalisation on rights of abode and a property register.
Then, late in 2005, a delegation fro the FCO and MoD told the Island Council to ditch their 2000 blueprint. On 20tth January last year, an extraordinary letter reached the island council from Lord Triesman, minister of state in the FCO and normally in charge pf policy in the Overseas Territories (in reality stings are pulled by the officials in DFID, the MOD, the Treasury and the FCO – in that order). Lord Triesman told the Council that he to “balance the aspirations of those living and working on Ascension Island against the risks to the UK in terms of contingent liabilities and security and developmental costs”. Permanent rights of abode and rights of property “would constitute a very fundamental change…and could not fail to bring an unacceptable level of risk to the UK. I have therefore concluded that the right abode and the establishment of the right to purchase property will not be developed.”
But the real opponent of the normal civil society was not Lord Triesman, nor the governor of St Helena and Dependencies, nor indeed Ascension’s hapless administrator. So who was it? Look no further than the Prime candidate to become deputy leader of the Labour party: Hilary Benn, currently secretary of the state for international development.
It was Benn’s officials who came up with the cock-and-bull arguments about “contingent liabilities” that made the reforms proposed by HMG in 2000 and begun in 2002 into changes opposed by HMG in 2005.
Ascension voters may use the general election for a new council on 1 May to show that Hilary Benn and Lord Triesman are the real liabilities. So, New Labour faces electoral meltdown not just in Scotland and Wales: the natives are rising in the pink bits as well.
© Private Eye 10th April 2007
Article Courtesy of Finn, finn@horizon.co.fk
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