AllVoices

Anguilla in the overseas press.  When I first read the article on Anguilla in All Voices I was concerned.  How could a newspaper publish such rubbish about UK "oppression" of Anguilla?  This is an extract:

“Anguilla has been nervously managing United Kingdom's threats to take governance of the country. Anguilla, a self governing and autonomous island country in the Caribbean, is also an UK territory with an installed UK governor overseeing "proper governance".

Just prior to the General Elections in the UK, Chris Bryant, the Foreign Affairs Minister at that time, had not only made threats against Anguilla but decisively and unilaterally rejected Anguilla's proposed budgets and refused to review amended budgets. This had many local government officials worried about UK's agenda there and saw this act as a sign that the UK was not willing to allow the Anguilla government to continue.

When speaking of Anguilla, the UK officials compare Anguilla to the Turks and Caicos. Recall that the UK invaded Turks and Caicos last August 2009 for what the UK called corruption concerns. However, nearly a year later, the UK has been unable to prove any local corruption and has pieced together a circumstantial case by using uncorroborated testimony by a dubious local opposition party …’ etc

I asked around about the paper and the author of the article.  I am not worried any longer.  A correspondent wrote me:

AllVoices is a blog, disguised in the form of an online newspaper,
where anyone can post any lies or rubbish.  Chris Burke is a
fictitious person who is an apologist for the Misick criminal
conspiracy.

I then Googled the four words Chris Burke journalist Turks and got enough to satisfy me that the characterisation of both is accurate.  The blog is unmoderated.  The author is reputedly a fanatical supporter of Misick masquerading as an English journalist residing in TCI.  She first started writing under this pseudonym in January of this year.

Conspiracy?

There is an interesting editorial in the Cayman Net News this morning.  I recommend you read it by clicking here.  It has to do with the old canard raised from time to time by some of my friends right here in Anguilla.  These are the conspiracy theorists, of whom I am sometimes one, who are convinced to the point of fanaticism that it is the secret desire and dastardly plot of “the British”, by whom I understand they mean the gnomes of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, to drive the native Anguillians out of the island and replace the population with Anglo Saxons.  Another version has it that it is the City of London which has hatched a plot to extinguish Anguilla’s offshore industry in order to spoon the cream onto its own strawberries.  Perhaps the most extreme version I have heard has it that Britain wants to replace the native Anguillians with Chinese and others because their own degenerate culture is under attack by the pristine purity of the Anguillian, and they must destroy us in self-defence!

The editorial expresses more eloquently and clearly than I ever could why all this hysteria is such a load of nonsense.

Of course the Cayman Net News is more restrained than I could ever be.

Still, it was entertaining to learn that this visceral fear is shared by our BOT cousins, and is not endemic to Anguilla.  I think even the most conspiracy-minded of us realise that if our economy and society is eventually ruined, it will have been done to us by our own politicians, contractors and businessmen.

And, did I hear Mitch on The Elkin Show a few weeks before the election speaking about his recent visit to the Turks and Caicos Islands?  I thought I heard him say that he found the majority of the people happy that the British FCO had temporarily got rid of their corrupt parliament and government.  Knowing Mitch, I half expected him to say that the population was planning a revolution against what that crook Misick called a “British Invasion”.  So much for the two pig-pen-dwelling political parties in TCI coming together to march in protest at the suspension of their constitution, as we have been hearing about recently. 

Let us hope that the British can help the TC Islanders to come up with a new Constitution that contains the safeguards that will guarantee transparency, accountability and integrity before they hand back local government to that bunch of swillers in the next eighteen months.  They don’t have much time left.