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A practical way Britain could help Caribbean islands
Donating equipment for a scrap metal yard would help clean up the local environment and benefit the lower end of the social pyramid before those higher up.
Around this time of year I for a month escape, with the better three quarters, the cold and damp of our sceptered isle for the warmth of the Caribbean. Before I had withdrawn from active business - I hung around the street corners of the City for far too long - it would be for a fortnight but one of the privileges of retirement is that I can afford both the cost and the time of spending half of both January and February in shorts and a T-shirt whilst friends at home are scraping windscreens and counting the layers.
Some years ago, my sister and I clubbed together and bought a little beach house on the island of Antigua and it to here that we flee. If pressed by envious friends I explain that this is my way of entirely altruistically effecting direct development aid for an emerging economy. We employ a local lady to come and clean the house, change the beds and do the laundry twice a week. She has been with us for years and we pay her a retainer when we are not here. Maintaining a house in the challenging climate is not easy and whoever believes they can "lock and leave" will be in for a shock. We have a local team of painters, plumbers, carpenters and whatnot who help us contain the ravages of the alternating heat and rain storms.
We are as hurricane-proof as one can be with a properly battened roof and electric shutters all around - it is the pressure differential created in the house if a window is broken that lifts off the roof - although it is good to know that the chances of losing a solidly constructed home to an earthquake are considerably higher than to a hurricane. We had a small one at 3 o’clock this morning. I doubt many would have noticed it.
There is of course the Antigua for the tourists, mainly British, American, Canadian and Italian. The French go to the French-speaking and largely wholly owned islands such as Guadeloupe or Saint Barthélémy. Germans generally appear to prefer south-east Asia. Since the 1950s, the Caribbean has been the playground of the British upper middle classes. The hardships of no mains water, miserable communications and limited goods in the local markets was a given that was accepted for what it was worth. Is suppose it was the old colonial spirit that prevailed.
Now, and at a price, one can leave the island's main hypermarket with a trolley identical to the one with which one at home leaves Waitrose. There are restaurants that can compare with the best anywhere in the world and the latest addition is The Hut, the Caribbean "branch" of the Isle of White hotspot that trendy young Londoners flock to like bees to the honey pot.
And then there is the Antigua of the Antiguans. Please don’t get me wrong. Here too there is a highly educated and successful middle class. There is the same social stratum of doctors, of lawyers, of accountants and of business owners who do very nicely thank you. The state of the roads leaves much to be desired - not unlike my home turf of West Oxfordshire - but that does not preclude them from driving the usual mix of BMWs, Mercedes and Porsches. The precipice, however, between the rich and the poor is huge, much larger than at home, and the conditions under which the majority of people live is lamentable. The widespread adherence to Rastafarian beliefs and the ubiquitous presence of ganja doesn’t exactly help.
What difference billions in gifts from former colonial powers might make to these people's lives is questionable. What it might do to the Florida bank balances of the political elites is possibly less so. I have been coming here for many years and it is here that I found the "Antigua fact". Everybody has a rumour, maybe even two. If they don't have one they make one up and that becomes an Antiguan fact. As in Graham Green novels, many of the Europeans who have washed up here have stayed for a reason, or maybe more accurately have for their own personal reasons not returned home.
I loath the argument over compensation and the fashionable virtue signalling that has become attached to it. Who will repay the British Isles for the monstrous sums spent on suppressing the Atlantic slave trade and on maintaining the Pax Britannica? Or, as one wit suggested to me, we should wait and then pass on every penny we receive from Italy in compensation for what the Romans did to us.
If there is one thing that visibly astonishes the European visitor, it is the many thousands of rusting carcasses of motor cars that litter the island. Around the world and famously in Cuba there is a skill in cannibalising defunct vehicles for any usable parts. Once all is gone, they are left to rot. On my road home there is the trailer of an oil tanker which has sat there for well over a decade. It is now barely visible through the plant life that has grown over it and newcomers would easily pass by it without even noticing. There are also the defunct sugar mills, for many years closed and left to rot. There appears to be no market for scrap metal.
I suppose the economics of removal and then shipping what there is to the US or Brazil to be recycled don’t add up. I don’t know this for a fact but I can see no other rational reason. So how about our government, if it really wants to help these islands and do environmentally beneficial work do they not donate the equipment for a scrap metal yard with the requisite lifts and presses, add in a couple of pickups with cranes and undertake to clean up the local environment. Providers of wrecked cars for scrapping might even be offered a small reward. Ship the scrap to wherever it can be smelted which with a bit of luck might even bring in a few shekels of income which could go towards the overall cost of the operation.
I know nothing about either metallurgy, shipping or development aid but if the Whitehall nomenclatura took a closer look at the issue - there might even be a convenient fact finding trip to be justified - they might find a cause which from the outset would benefit the lower end of the social pyramid before those higher up. As Mark, played by Tom Wisdom, cooley declares in The Boat the Rocked, "How about it?"