The London Office of the Government of Anguilla has made available an interview conducted by Mr. Andrew Miller of the Foreign Office Desk (Radio) with representatives of the British Overseas Territories about how they will fare when the United Kingdom leaves the European Union.
Of particular interest to the people of Anguilla is the section of the interview with Mrs. Blondel Cluff, CBE, the Government’s EU/UK Representative in London. It deals exclusively with matters concerning the relationships affecting Anguilla, French St. Martin and Dutch St. Maarten after Brexit. Here is that portion of the interview, as transcribed by The Anguillian newspaper, in which Mr. Miller questioned Mrs. Cluff.
Miller: Let’s look back, first of all, to the summer of 2016 and the Brexit vote. When it became clear that the vote was to leave, what was the general response on Anguilla?
Cluff: I think it was one of surprise. I think that was the case in the UK as well, but it was also one of gosh – have they taken us into consideration in this because we were not given a vote in Anguilla?
Miller: So following the referendum, how quickly were Anguillians and Anguillian authorities able to get an idea of what the practical implications of Brexit were going to be?
Cluff: Within two days I took a delegation, comprising the Deputy Chief Minister and the Senior Minister from the Government of Anguilla, to Brussels and I arranged meetings with the EU Commission so that they could hear, at first hand, what the EC thought this meant to us.
Miller: And what did they tell you at those initial EU meetings?
Cluff: Well, again, we found a place that was in utter complete shock. They understood and, again, this is something which is not yet fully comprehended in the UK. They understood the socio-economic relationships between the islands [Anguilla, St. Martin, St. Maarten] and this is something which had gone on for centuries. It is a cultural thing that we all mix and move freely between the islands and we interact accordingly.
Miller: There is a cultural aspect which we will come back to, but I do want to talk about one specific – and I guess one perhaps emblematic difficulty you are now faced with. For the benefit of listeners, who are not entirely familiar with the geography of your part of the Caribbean, could you explain the slightly curious relationship that Anguilla has with its nearest major international airport?
Cluff: Well, Anguilla has only one runway and so we are very dependent on the neighbouring island of St. Maarten. St Maarten was split in half in 1638. In fact… on one half – the Dutch side – is the international airport and that is where the majority of our tourists arrive. Those individuals would then have to move from a country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands into a Collectivity of France which is effectively an outermost region of the EU. So you are basically moving from a country of the Netherlands into a county of France, and then getting into a British Overseas Territory, and that is the route for the majority of our tourists – and tourism is the main industry in Anguilla.
Miller: And presumably not only tourism. Is there a major import/export hub for you as well?
Cluff: It is. Again, I think that people are playing it down, and they are playing it down very heavy-handedly because if you think about life you may go for a weekly shop but those corner shops and small businesses within your vicinity are invariably the lifeblood for people. For us, MRI scanning, cardio treatment, oncology – all happens through the support of St. Martin/St. Maarten, so it is very important to us that we have access to those services on an ongoing basis or that we get support to build them up in Anguilla which has not been forthcoming.
Miller: Is the relationship with that airport so important to Anguilla that the possibility of that link being severed poses an almost existential threat to the island?
Cluff: It will impact on its [Anguilla’s] economy bearing in mind that all of these islands were hit by Hurricane Irma last year – the worst hurricane on record. Certainly, St. Martin/ St. Maarten and Anguilla were decimated by this. For that airport – the Princess Juliana Airport – in Dutch St. Maarten to have a decent economic model, it really would not want to lose tens of thousands of tourists enroute to Anguilla. That would impact the Dutch side. Again, the French [side] also benefits from …tourists many of whom stay overnight in the French and Dutch island on their way to Anguilla; and also those who stay in Anguilla visit St Maarten for shopping because we don’t have the same sort of commercial retail offer as St. Martin/St Maarten has. The other side of the coin is that Anguilla is an under-populated agricultural island with a huge expanse of sea, and so we are the bread basket in terms of fresh produce for St. Martin/ St Maarten which has a population of a hundred thousand versus Anguilla’s fifteen thousand…
Miller: You mentioned the destruction that Hurricane Irma visited upon Anguilla. Is membership of the EU important in planning the rebuilding and reconstruction [of Anguilla] – or at least how much of the planning or reconstruction was contingent on that assumption?
Cluff: We are placed in a rather usual situation. I don’t know if you recall last year when there was a huge debate on whether or not Britain could use its point seven percent of its budget for overseas developmental assistance. And it was concluded that Britain could not use the 13.9 billion that it had set aside for international development to help its own territories. Anguilla’s significant source of developmental aid has always come from the EU. Indeed, in 2016 it accounted for 36 percent of the developmental budget of Anguilla. Those figures were altered because Britain is now helping us to recover from Hurricane Irma. But, as a norm, Anguilla looked to the EU for its main source of developmental assistance and it was made quite clear, last year, that we have no other source directly from the UK under the current regime; so unless someone creates some new source from the UK so that it could help Anguilla going forward after Brexit, after 2020 when this current [quota] of EU funding evaporates, then we have nothing.
Miller: So in the last couple of years since the [Brexit) referendum, what kind of consultations have there been between the Government of Anguilla and the United Kingdom? The Government of the United Kingdom is quite obviously trying to deal with… the consequences of what I think was an unexpected vote for them. Do you get a sense that Anguilla is terribly high in their list of priorities?
Cluff: You got to understand the Constitution of the British Overseas Territories. They have no voice on the international stage. There is not the right for even a democratically-elected Government to speak to the outside world. Only one person … can speak or conduct external affairs and that is the Governor who is a Civil Servant appointed by the Foreign Office. So unless and, until, the Foreign Office or Her Majesty’s Government here decide to look after the territories they cannot interact with the outside world. And that was made very clear last year immediately after the hurricanes when we went to the UN, courtesy of the UN and CARICOM which is the Caribbean’s equivalent to the EU – if you like – where the world stepped up and said gosh this is a terrible thing and we want to help you. And in that room – and I sat in that room for two days – one point four billion US dollars was raised. But the British Overseas Territories could not access it because the external affairs were conducted by the British Government who chose not to ask for the assistance on their behalf.
Miller: Is any of this prompting on Anguilla itself a certain measure of what has the British ever done for us thinking? Are there any rumblings of independence?
Cluff: We are a very strange people (laugh). We have been British since 1650 and during that 368-year period, 134 of those years were spent in enslavement. We were basically enslaved. You will see that 51 years ago we actually had a revolution…where we fought to remain British because there was at attempt in 1967 to jettison us. We are British. That’s who we are. We are a fusion of the indigenous people – people from Africa and people from Europe. We are creole. We are people who have been born out of this fusion of race and heritage. That fusion was born under that British flag and we seek to remain that way.
Miller: With Brexit due in March and clearly Anguilla placed in a series of extremely strange positions, are there any consensuses building around what might be a solution? For example, with the airport – how it will be possible for people and goods to transport themselves seamlessly from the Netherlands to France to a British Overseas Territory as they have been able to do before?
Cluff: I was very buoyed up by my visit to Brussels with my team last week where we met with the Permanent Representative officials of the French and Dutch. All of the islanders want to work together to make this thing work. But, as I said, in the absence of it [Brexit] being tabled as an issue for consideration in the withdrawal agreement, then there will not be a platform to negotiate it in terms of future arrangements which is effectively phase two. And so protocol demands that someone remembers that we exist; someone remembers to utter the words that have been their mantra to the people of Anguilla: nothing will change – in fact not to say it in such an arrogant fashion … but we would like nothing to change. And on the basis that we on the islands want this to be the case, then I think we can go forward and start to negotiate the nitty gritty next year.
Whichever way you look at it, we don’t wish to be collateral damage in a dispute between Europe powers. We did that in the 1700s with the Austrian War of Sucession, the Spanish War of Sucession …We have always been collateral damage but this is the information age that we live in, and people know that we exist and I hope that people will respect the lives – not only of the 15,000 Anguillians but of our cousins, friends and family on St. Martin/St. Maarten where there are a further hundred thousand lives and livelihoods at stake.
