FCO-FAC

Is it appropriate for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to continue to be the Department through which Anguilla relates to the British Parliament and Government? I read a transcript of the Westminster Hall Debate of 23 April 2009 with interest. The topic of the debate was the recent report by the Foreign Affairs Committee into the governance of the Overseas Territories by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

If you would like to read a short account of the debate, you can find it here.

The debate was three hours long. If you have the time to view a video of the entire debate, it is available here

The full text is available on the on-line Hansard here.

There were several aspects of the debate worth examining and writing about. The one I want to focus on today was an observation made by Andrew Rosindell, the Conservative Shadow Minister for Home Affairs, and then to comment. He suggested that the FCO may not be the most appropriate British government department to have oversight of the British Overseas Territories.

This is what he had to say:

“This issue should not be under foreign affairs. They are not foreign; they are British. Why is it under foreign affairs? Why are British overseas territories — territories of Her Majesty the Queen — under the Foreign Office? They are neither foreign nor Commonwealth. They are not members of the Commonwealth in their own right. They are British overseas territories in the Commonwealth only via Britain, so they should not really be under the Foreign Office at all. They should be placed in the same Department, whichever Department that is, as the British Crown dependencies. Jersey, Guernsey, the Isle of Man and the British Overseas Territories should all be placed together under one Department, but not the Foreign Office.”

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Anguilla and the other colonies in the West Indies were overseen by the committee of the Privy Council entitled, The Committee for Trade and Foreign Plantations. At that time in colonial history we were all labeled as “America”. So, there was the governor of “New York, in America”. There was the attorney-general of “Antigua, in America”, and there was the executive council of “Bermuda, in America”.

The Colonial Office replaced the Privy Council committee in 1768. It ran the colonies in the West Indies until late in the twentieth century. In 1968, with much of Africa and the West Indies having gone independent, the Colonial Office was merged with the Foreign Office.

As an aside, it seems to me that the philosophy behind the merger was straightforward. Those were the days when, as it was said, “Wogs begin at Dover”. Anyone from overseas was not really British, and was by definition foreign, or, worse, a wog. The thinking in Downing Street then, no doubt, was, we may as well lump the colonials and the Commonwealth in together with all those other wogs. So was born the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

British attitudes have changed. They do not think that way or speak that way any longer. [I sometimes think that we in the colonies learned from them too well. Many of the older ones among us, those over 30 years of age, still hold tenaciously to our juvenile race prejudices and fear of the foreigner. We think it make us culturally superior to those mongrel British who now promiscuously treat with all those foreigners. Little do we realise that it is just old-fashioned and outdated British race prejudice that we are aping.] As is so often the case with mimic-men, as Naipaul calls us, the original source of the behaviour has long changed, but we remain zombie-like, our prejudices frozen in the colonial past.

But, back to the main point. It is time for the UK to face up to the fact that Mr Rosindell highlights. It is an insult for us in the British Overseas Territories to continue to relate to the British Parliament and Government through the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. A more relevant and suitable British Government Department must be found to replace the FCO in managing Britain's responsibilities in relation to the BOTs.

And, as an aside, is it not remarkable that they have their parliamentary and committee debates up on their website on the same day?

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14 September 2007 - UK Relations