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Foreign and Commonwealth Offic London SW1A 2AH
PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL
Telephone 01.
OAGS: ANGUILLA, BRITISH VIRGIN ISLANDS, CAYMAN ISLANDS, MONTSERRAT, TURKS AND CAICOS ISLANDS ST HELENA, ASCENSION ISLAND, TRISTAN DA CUNHA, Mr Lloyd BERMUDA
HKG 025/2
Y NO. 51
RECEIVED IN
300CT 1978
DESK OFFIC
INDEX
No
FA
ве
REGISTRY Action Taken
Your reference cc. On thee 012/5 at W7)
Our reference
Date
4 August 1978
1. On emerging from a week's isolation in Marlborough House at the St Lucia Constitutional Conference (where I had seen at the most only the day's telegrams and echoes of urgent business which the department were pursuing) it struck me again how much WIAD is concerned with short-term business which needs quick action but too often does not get the thought it deserves. The Dependent Territories Division's work does not rank high in the overall pattern of British overseas relations but much of it is tricky and demanding and, as the capital punishment issue demonstrates at times very sensitive for the British Government. We need therefore to spend more time thinking about what we should be doing in 2 or 3 years time. This letter is therefore an attempt to describe how the happenings in your various territories look to us in the Department and to throw out a few thoughts on the general question of decolonisation.
2. It is now 18 months for instance since we agreed in Bridgetown that we needed a new look at the issue of decolonisation: WIAĎ accor- dingly undertook to see whether there was a future in a much more structured approach to this with perhaps speeches, answers to arranged questions, seminars and inspired articles in the serious press as preparation for a possible gathering in London of representatives of dependencies to try to overcome some of their generic reluctance over independence. Since then we have mulled over these ideas repeatedly, not I confess from any rigorously intellectual first principles but as a consequence of a series of incidents like the sit-in outside Government House in Grand Turk last October, the Bermuda disturbances last December, the problem of internal security in an Anguilla not yet separated from St Kitts and most recently the precautions we had to take against possible civil disorder in Tortela.
3. I thought, therefore, that it might interest you to hear a little of the sort of issues we have been handling here, not in any way just to show how busy we are and to ask for patience when your own affairs seem to be neglected, but because you may find it useful in considering your own problems to know a little more than perhaps you do already of those facing your colleagues.
4
On the Associated States and Bermuda side Michael Sullivan and David Cockerham have been extended beyond measure. There has hardly been a month since January when we have not had a meeting here to discuss independence for one or other Associated State with Ted Rowlands in the chair, pretty massive briefing, hospitality and so on. We have been dogged by the unfortunate precedent of Grenada, whose Government,
/despite
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