The Descent of Ascension as a Symptom of Britain's Decline

Ascension Island was indispensable to the Falklands War in 1982: without that airbase the islands could not have been supplied. Subsequently, until recent weeks, regular RAF flights from the UK to Stanley have stopped off at the Ascension airstrip: which has given the locals a regular access to the UK for themselves and for supplies. That has had to stop: the islanders must now travel several days by ship to South Africa to get a commercial flight to Britain. Sick people are in a deep quandary and it is impossible urgently to secure any medical supplies.

The reason for this is Osbornian austerity: the cuts that have so disastrously undermined every aspect of social and public services in the UK and its dependencies. Under a longstanding agreement, the Americans have use of the Ascension airstrip; in return for which, they maintain it. The cuts in UK defence spending [even before the Queen Elizabeth is fully manned or armed] mean that the RAF has had to dispense with the planes that have formed the 'airbridge' between Brize Norton and Stanley, via Ascension. The planes that are now available are unsuitable for the increasingly ropey surface of the airstrip on Ascension, which the Americans do not plan to upgrade for a couple of years. Thus an important point of communications, which has been militarily vital since at least the Second World War, is left to fester along with with council tower blocks, decaying schools, under-equipped hospitals and all the other increasingly conspicuous evidences of the failure of the state.

Ascension island is a long way off, so it is almost completely out of mind to the British public: which suits their government very well. The Tories [aided and abetted by the LibDems for their first five years in office] have painted themselves - and the country - into a corner where many options are cut off, and will remain so until the inevitable decision is taken to open up the stop-cocks of state spending. Then the catching-up will be begun, with remote islands in the South Atlantic very low down the list of priorities.

But hereby hangs another tale. The UK government, after a century of pleading, did build an airport on the larger island of St Helena: and located it in a place where the prevailing winds make it next to impossible for the sort of 'planes that could use the airport to do so. So one dead duck and one white elephant have been provided on the UK's major possessions in the mid-south-Atlantic. Thus the bureaucracy and the supine politicians whom they manipulate have embarrassed the nation, at significant cost in the case of St Helena and at the opportunity-cost of surrendering essential access to Ascension. Between crass incompetence and cretinous austerity Britain has created a total cock-up.

But why should anyone really take notice? The answer is very clear. Today the Chinese president drops in on Hong Kong, to mark the twentieth anniversary of the surrender that Mrs Thatcher left it to John Major and Chris Patten to complete, the abandonment of any chance to secure the then-colony's independence. Hong Kong is inexorably being wound in to the hegemonic block that China wants to consolidate. Meanwhile, China is building islands islands in the South China Sea to provide military bases and evidence on the map that a huge area is 'Chinese home waters'. Those claims are contested, and will increasingly be a source of friction with neighbouring countries and the USA.

Meanwhile, Britain is frittering away the residue of a great empire: in the island territories all around the world that could be developed [as the Chinese are developing theirs] into strategically significant points of focus. If Britain would just invest the necessary few billions of pounds the islands from Ascension to Pitcairn to South Georgia would restore a global presence as the contest to control the resources that are accessible in and under the oceans becomes increasingly important. The UK has given up or wasted most of its assets. It should quickly undertake a rational audit of what we have, and what can be done with it by an enterprising nation.

Building the Empire

Oliver Cromwell's ruthlessness was well recognised after his intervention in Scotland, but his subsequent activities in Ireland became legendary even in that age of brutal religious warfare; they were to be cited for centuries after the massacres that he unleashed in captured cities. The subsequent settlement of retired republican soldiers on captured farmland in Ulster, especially in County Down, implanted a population that was to be implacably unionist right through to the twenty-first century. This was directed to keeping the second largest of the British Isles under a London-based government, which had been the situation for four centuries. Ireland provided examples that were adopted - when deemed to be appropriate - by those who began to build the landward extensions of the maritime empire. Systematic settlement of Britons beyond Ireland began with both Puritan and Catholic 'plantations' on the east coast of North America  and was extended by the capture of Jamaica in  1655. The collapse of the English Republic after Cromwell's death [in September 1658] allowed privateers [licensed pirates] to use Jamaica as their base until the most successful privateer, 'Captain' Henry Morgan, was appointed as Charles II's Governor of the island - duly honoured with a knighthood - and by bribery and by force he established a form of governance which enabled the colony rapidly to became rich on the basis of slave labour producing sugar.

Elizabethan sea captains had traded slaves from Africa to the Spanish and Portugese colonists: this appalling trade continued under the Stuart monarchy and the puritan Republic, and after 1660 the restored monarchy facilitated the traffic in humans to Britain's own plantations in the southern colonies in North America as well as to the the Caribbean islands. Colleges, cathedrals and a huge range of commercial organisations invested in slave farming for sugar and cotton, in particular. Marketing and transporting colonial produce to both UK and European markets became massively profitable activities. The ports of London, Bristol and Liverpool grew massively on the basis of colonial trade, which was primarily with the Americas but was also expanding in Asia. Charles II's Queen, Katherine of Breganza, brought as items of her dowry Tangier and Bombay: while Tangier was soon lost, Bombay was the basis for British expansion in India which created an empire [or Raj] which was surrendered only in 1947. Islands were occupied around the world to provide safe havens where British ships could take on water and fresh meat and repair storm damage, which could be developed as coaling stations when steam power was introduced in the nineteenth century. Portuguese, Dutch and British trading posts were established on the coast of Africa, originally as places where slaves could be acquired from indigenous rulers. Gibraltar [an isolated peninsula of the European mainland, which the British have treated as 'virtually an island']] was ceded by Spain under the Treaty of Utrecht [1713] after having been occupied in 1704; Malta was occupied during the Napoleonic War and ceded officially to Britain under the Treaty of Vienna that settled frontiers after the final defeat of Napoleon, and Cyprus was grabbed by Britain from the declining Ottoman Empire under the Treaty of Berlin in 1878. Britain retained 'sovereign bases' in Cyprus when the former colony was granted its independence and these have had huge importance for the USA as well as the UK as 'listening posts' in the middle east and the former USSR. Britain's scurrilous expulsion of the native people of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean in order for it to become an 'unsinkable aircraft carrier' for the United States [nominally under British sovereignty] and a very similar fate has befallen Ascension Island which is central to the Atlantic.

Now that all the large colonies, protectorates and other 'dominions' have been granted independence, the left-over islands alone remain from the great imperial past. Successive governments, before the present one, have largely regarded the remaining 'dependencies' as a costly nuisance. Such blind stupidity is embarrassing.
The islands [and Gibraltar] remain: they can be engaged to make Britain a leading world power yet again.