One of the few parts of my worldview which has changed in adulthood is my view of British colonialism. As a teenager, like most teenagers, I liked the idea of painting the map red with beskirted soldiers marching in formation and would’ve probably gotten very upset over the Chagos deal.
I still believe that actually existing colonialism in which the resources of lawless states, like South Africa, are exploited for Meritocracy is a moral and economic imperative for the New State. Alas, there is an irritating form of Tufton Street Imperialism which steadily turned me off East of Suez. This discourse is centred on Britain’s venal ‘crown dependencies’, the thieves guild known as ‘the Commonwealth’ and supplies an endless stream of photographs of identically podgy Freemasons posing with identical black men in some gouty corner of St. James. Each of these territories seem to be client states of individual, 4-person cliques within the British Centre-Right; and we never seem to be able to fully count them, Somaliland, which I’m pretty sure was never part of the Commonwealth, has been stealthily upgraded to one of our ‘ties.’
It is hard to get upset about Britain’s overseas dependencies because we have essentially legislated ourselves into never, ever exploiting them, as we should, to increase our economic and military power. Consider the case of the Falkland Islands, this is a territory over which Britain’s right to act freely is morally watertight, British sons and fathers were sent to die horrible deaths in freezing cold water to defend the freedom of some sheep-farmers to never learn Spanish. The Falklands War is perhaps the only event of the 20th century about which all British people have a right to be patriotic. It is therefore an act of monumental ingratitude that the glorified ‘assembly’ of the rotten little archipelago has, since 1994, primly insisted that it reserves the exclusive right to grant licenses for oil exploitation and will accrue all royalties and CT receipts in its own grubby little coffers.
So long as this is the case, we cannot fault Donald J. Trump, a man of Hard Facts, for correctly noting that nothing has been done with the Falklands so they may as well be given to the Dagos to see what happens. The Falkland Islands will, of course, never actually grant these licenses because they will contravene various international treaties to which the Islands, under the brand-name ‘UK’ are party but cannot actually withdraw from not being sovereign. The pure troll-factor of triggering the Marquis of Granby clientele by simply selling them to Argentina without fuss becomes appealing. However, like my adolescent self, a large percentage of the Boomer electorate will always care about the little bits of pink on the globe and, as such, can be whipped into unproductive frenzies against any attempt to settle them. Rationally administering these territories is thus a necessity, rather than a LARP, for any right-wing party.
Fortunately, all of these things are easy to fix. Overseas Territories are governed entirely by the Royal Prerogative, the Falkland Islands ‘constitution’ for example, only exists as an order of the British privy council. Reform UK should announce that it will use Orders in Council to amend the ‘constitution’ of the Falkland Islands in order to restore these powers to the British state and, crucially, replace the tyrannical current ruling on profit destinations with a more proportional arrangement where the islands get a 10% ‘development’ fee and the rest is spent by London. It doesn’t even require a vote in Parliament.
The kayfabe of separation from Britain is essential to the economic viability of many overseas territories, and so it is useful that the prerogative can simply alter their secondary legislation rather than abolish their separate legislatures outright. Opening up the Falklands to oil and gas is mainly a prelude to the real prize which are the tax havens, like the Cayman Islands. The Cayman Islands are the site of the largest concentration of USD outside the United States proper. It is essential, if Britain wants to replicate something like Trump’s neo-mercantilism that these tax havens are brought under the (crypto) regulatory control of London. They are essentially free foreign capital reserves Westminster refuses to touch due to anti-meritocratic incompetence which could be used as part of an inflation-reduction anent mass deportations (don’t both trying to steal this for some dumb x dot com thread the right people already know).
It would, of course, be sensible for Reform to abolish the Commonwealth – it is a sublimely pointless organisation which had the temerity, three years ago, to demand reparations from Britain for buying the descendents of the Barbadian delegation from the descendents of the Nigerian delegation. Alas, certain donors to Reform seem to have an enthusiastic and benighted interest in the body and so it will be difficult to persuade leadership to do the right thing and unilaterally withdraw. They cannot, however, complain about ‘reforming’ the organisation and by ‘reforming’ I mean taking a leaf out of the Trump-NATO playbook and demanding all Commonwealth realms pay a flat tax of 0.1-0.5% GDP to the FCDO for the privilege of belonging to such an exclusive club. In fact, that raises an interesting idea, what if we outsourced certain bits of the budget entirely to ‘the Commonwealth?’ Britain is going to cut foreign aid to 0% one way or the other but we could continue reaping the rewards of influence and morale without it costing us a penny. Simply declare that, from now on, Britain’s aid contributions will be financed collectively by the Commonwealth realms.