The Honourable Premier of Anguilla, Dr. Ellis Webster, joined his British Overseas Territories’ counterparts at a Pre-Joint Ministerial Council (JMC) meeting on Tuesday, November 3, with Baroness Sugg and other UK Government officials. It was the second such meeting, the first of which was held recently.
The Anguillian leader said: “The Joint Ministerial Council meeting of the leaders of the Overseas Territories will be starting on November 23rd. We have had a pre-JMC meeting a couple weeks ago and now, coincidentally today, about in an hour, we will be having another pre-JMC meeting with Baroness Sugg. I look forward to that when we can inform her about our concerns and what we would like to bring up in November.”
Asked what some of the concerns were, he replied: “The relationship with the United Kingdom. All of the Overseas Territories are certainly concerned about Brexit and what will happen in that regard. There are concerns about the European Development Fund (EDF) under which Anguilla gets funding for policies and budgetary deficits. We want to make sure that with Brexit happened, the United Kingdom would meet similar grant amounts.
“We, in Anguilla, are concerned about our borders with European territories like St. Martin/St Maarten because that has to be defined since we are not part of the European Union. We are concerned about climate change; the economy – in terms of the green economy whereby we want to pursue renewable energy; and we are concerned about our recovery from Covid19 because our tourism has been hit very hard. And so we want to diversify the economy in terms of our 200-mile economic exclusive fishing zone with technical and financial help from the United Kingdom.
“We have a significant debt, of almost five million dollars, and we want to make certain that we can meet our debt obligations – and this is going to require that we have our economy back on track. We want to have some economic stimulus because, when the Anguilla Programme Projects are over, [we need some more projects]. We thank the UK Government for the 60 million pounds post Hurricane Irma grant for education, health facilities and the Blowing Point project etc. We still want to make sure that the construction sector continues to bloom when this programme is over, and this will require an injection into the economy.”
