TNAG-0714-FCO40-910-Future-of-the-Dependent-Territories-1978 — Page 137

SPEECH NOTES

DECOLONISATION

1. The British Government accept that the age of colonialism is past. We subscribe fully to UN policies on self-determination for colonial peoples. Where the majority of the population of one of our Dependent Territories show they want independence we do all we can to help them achieve it in as rapid and orderly a manner as possible. Our purpose always is to create states that are both politically and economically viable. Our programme of Aid for the Dependent Territories is specifically geared to achieving this. Only a decade or so ago there were doubts whether States with much less than a few hundred thousand

inhabitants could ever be viable. Views on this have changed and there are now independent States already in existence with fewer inhabitants than a small English country town.

2. Despite this policy Britain still has responsibility for 17 Dependent Overseas Territories 18 if you include Anguilla which, though still constitutionally part of the Associated State of St Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla, is administered as though it were a Dependent Territory. There are several reasons why this should be so. First and foremost, it would be against our policy to force independence on States before the inhabitants themselves believe they are ready for it. The progress towards independence is continuing in a number of our Dependent Territories and we expect at least three or four of them to be independent by the end of 1980. In some Territories there are political obstacles to independence, either because, like the Falkland Islands and Belize, our sovereignty is disputed by other countries, or because for historical reasons independence is not an option, as in Gibraltar and Hong Kong. In other cases, even by the standards of recent years, it remains doubtful that a Territory could ever survive as an independent State: the extreme example of this is Pitcairn with a population of less than 100, unless you count Territories like the British Indian Ocean Territory or the British Antarctic Territory which have no permanent population at all.