TNAG-0834-FCO40-1042-Foreign-and-Commonwealth-Office-seminar-on-the-future-of-Bri-1979 — Page 16

Points Made in Session 3: The problems of Small States and Alternatives to Independence

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Smallness

Small states have much more open economies, more dependent on external trade and (providing they have good communciations) with a relatively high number of people moving in and out. They suffer from dis- economies of smallness:normal services are relatively much more expensive to provide, and many specialised skills are simply not available in small communities. Certain problems that exist in any society can assume exaggerated significance in a small country if two hey people happen not to like each other.

Alternatives to Indpendence

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Various possibilities for regional cooperation were discussed, including the possibility of resurrecting the Leeward Islands Federation. But past history of such groupings is not encouraging, and Britain would almost certainly have to make a substantial, and continuing, contribution to the cost of including the dependencies in any such scheme. Federations are therefore best left for consideration after independence when the territories can participate on a besis of constitutional equality.

Almost any alternative to independence raises the spectre of responsibility without power. Even where reserve powers exist,

there

is such reluctance to use them that it must be questionable whether they really can be said to exist.

Solution

For the five Caribbean territories, the only long term possit though

must be independence, For Pitcairn, the future must lie in education possibly probably to Australia or New Zealand. Bermuda is clearly capable of within becoming independent and the events of 1977 have provided the regional catalyst that have set it on that path. For St Helena, some sort of rossh integration on the Channel Islands pattern might be feasible, though

we should need to be conscious of the effect any such precedent might

framework, have on the territories outside the scope of the seminar. We should also

then be left with the problem of what to do with Ascension Island and Tristan da Cunha

This would then leavens with the rest o problem of what to do with an impopulated territory-a question outside

the scope of the present scimmar.