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[Mr. Spearing]
Dependent Territories
15 APRIL 1983
those territories have no wish to do so. They feel that it is better to be associated with Britain in a proper manner than to embark on the hazards that they have seen.
Next Monday the House will debate the second Brandt report and all the questions that arise from it. When the debate is over the question will remain, "What can we do?". Although we may be able to do many things on the international stage, one of the things that we must do, one of things that we can do, and one of the things that the House has a deep moral responsibility to do, is to look to the welfare and development of our dependencies.
11.18 am
Sir Bernard Braine (Essex, South-East): We must be grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Orpington (Mr. Stanbrook) for providing us with an opportunity to discuss our responsibilities to the remaining dependencies and to ensure that Ministers give an account of their stewardship. My hon. Friend rightly remarked that it is now a long time since we have had a debate of this nature. It is a harsh truth that all Governments are reluctant to find time for such matters, finding such debates of only peripheral interest. The only time that Governments sit up and take notice is when neglect or indifference or a combination of both produces a crisis, examples of which range from the comic opera in Anguilla, which was ultimately resolved by a posse of London police constables, to the quite unnecessary war in the Falklands last year.
More than a quarter of a century ago, before any Member present today was an hon. Member, I advocated a merger of the Commonwealth and Colonial Offices because I foresaw some of the difficulties that lay ahead. That is all on record. It appeared to me that there would be a profound psychological effect of such an arrangement on our relations with the colonial territories-there were many more at that time-most of which were moving towards independence but some of which inevitably would remain tied in one way or another to this country.
However, I was profoundly opposed to the subsequent merger of the enlarged Commonwealth Office with the Foreign Office in the late 1960s. In my opinion that was a wholly wrong decision, and it led to serious errors. Within the new organisation, the Falkland Islands, for example, was managed from the Latin American desk and it was always thereafter to be seen as an obstacle to improving our relations with Latin America and with Argentina in particular.
There is a very revealing passage in a book by Mr. Joe Haines, the very able press secretary to the right hon. Member for Huyton (Sir. H. Wilson) when he was Prime Minister. Mr. Haines seems to have correctly judged the matter when he wrote of this period:
"If it were possible to compress the FCO's ideal world into a single concept, I suppose it would look something like a Common Market peopled entirely by crusading anti-communist Bedouin. If I lived in Gibraltar or the Falkland Islands I would not sleep at night for worrying about it, because so far as policy is concerned, those territories are peripheral; if the British connection is to be preserved it will be up to the politicians to do it. The officials will never die in the ditch for either of them."
When the full story of the Falklands tragedy comes to be told, it will be seen that signal after signal was sent by Whitehall to Buenos Aires demonstrating that the British
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Government did not really care about the islands. It is only fair to say that over the years the Argentine authorities were misled.
If I sound a critical note, it is because some of us who cared about the Commonwealth foresaw a great deal of this happening. Our critics think that this is a reflection of a nostalgia for old imperial glories. That is nonsence. Very few hon. Members in the House today can know with what enthusiasm we regarded the decolonisation process which got under way in the 1950s, which saw the ending of tutelage and the beginning of partnership within the family circle of an ever-widening Commonwealth, which saw it as the fulfilment of a trust, a triumph of reason and a source of pride in British achievement. Only a few may remember our warnings about the last stages of the decolonisation process, the most difficult, especially when we come to the very small territories-the detritus of the empire, as they were described rather inelegantly in one newspaper.
Yet such territories have as much right to consideration as the larger ones. They served us in our imperial heyday and they were loyal to us in our difficult times. Even the United Nations charter recognises that they have the right to self-determination and that the interests of their people are paramount.
It is not we who were blind. The Argentina invasion of 2 April 1982 tok place not simply because of mistakes in the preceding few months, although it may have been helped by them, but because of a combination of ineptitude, indifference and moral blindness that had characterised British policy over the Falklands for almost two decades.
The errors from the mid-1960s onwards can be stated simply. The first was the failure to understand from the outset that as the process of decolonisation gathered momentum everywhere else in the former empire, there would be risks in the perpetuation of colonial status for the Falkland Islands. The hon. Member for West Lothian (Mr. Dalyell) was right in his reference to that a few moments ago.
The second error was the failure to see that if Britain was not prepared to offer the Falkland islanders outright integration into the United Kingdom, they would have to be given an enhanced constitutional status and more effective control over their internal affairs.
The third error was the failure to ensure appropriate economic development-with Argentina's co-operation if possible, but without it if it were withheld.
The fourth error was the failure to see that, after the military coup in Argentina in March 1976, it was not only politically unwise but morally wrong to engage in any negotiation over a transfer of sovereignty to a cruel and repulsive regime guilty before the whole world of gross and continued violations of human rights and therefore palpably unfit to govern its own people, let alone a British democratic comunity, albeit small, nurtured in the tradition of freedom of our own people.
For full measure, I might add a fifth error -the failure to appreciate that a weak, unprincipled and immoral policy is never likely to produce positive results, and it did not do so in this case.
Perhaps I may be permitted to remark in passing that, when the first steps were taken to get rid of the Falkland Islands, the islanders were making no claim for British aid. As I reminded the House a few moments ago, they were in fact making a net contribution to the British balance of
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