Joe Friday, a Californian detective in Dragnet, a long-running television series, was often quoted for asking his female suspects for “the facts, ma’am — just the facts,” but he never actually said those words. They originated in a parody of the show.
Similarly, media news stories and political speeches can be deceptive, sometimes masking the underlying reason for some action or policy. However, perceptions can often be more powerful than actuality in politics.
I will comment briefly on each of the three topics covered on the front page of last week’s Beacon: the Windrush scandal; enforced public registers; and our state of hurricane preparedness.
Windrush scandal
The Guardian has reported that thousands of migrants who have settled in Britain have no passport and that over a thousand highly skilled ones are wrongly facing deportation as a result of the Home Office’s crackdown.
I was particularly indignant as to how the Home Office was treating West Indian immigrants and their descendants who had been recruited to help the mother country recover from World War II.
I had seen some arrive at a London train terminal in 1949, clutching large suitcases.
What struck me was not their skin colour (I’d encountered African-American GIs in the run-up to D-Day) but that their uniform pale blue tropical suits and floppy, broad-brimmed hats betrayed their unpreparedness for British weather. Otherwise, they all looked very fit. I don’t remember seeing any women among them, though.
However, re-reading Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-racial Britain (1998) — a book by black British brothers Trevor and Mike Phillips that is based on first hand accounts — I realised how far the myth of that pioneering voyage had departed from its reality.
The S.S. Empire Windrush was a former German troopship resurrected to carry British troops, and it was later used to carry goods and passengers to the United Kingdom during a tour of the Caribbean.
An advertisement in The Jamaica Gleaner for 430 berths brought an overwhelming response from Jamaicans wanting to leave for a better life in Britain. Many had skills to offer, and all had enough money to pay for their fares and even had a whipround to buy a ticket for a woman who had stowed away.
However, none had been offered work by British employers and few understood the need for formal IDs. Rather than having been recruited by British employers, the Labour government met news of their approach with consternation.
Perhaps the most serious aspect of the whole affair is the arbitrary way the Home Office staff had destroyed the landing cards that recorded their immigration status at the time and has subsequently targeted them for lack of proof of their right of abode in the UK. Politically motivated bureaucracy!
‘Know your Critics’
“KYC” traditionally stands for Know Your Customer, the mantra central to anti-money-laundering procedures, but in the heated atmosphere surrounding the threatened imposition of public registers, our financial services industry would also be well advised to Know your Critics and where they are coming from.
We should not underestimate the strength of anti-Russian feeling in the UK generated by the poisonings in Salisbury. One aspect of this the Beacon did not specifically mention last week is the calls for the increase of sanctions on oligarchs who support Russian President Vladimir Putin.
In searching for ways of turning the screws on them effectively, attention was drawn to the expensive properties in London whose purchase had been financed through VI-registered companies. Some MPs may hitherto have turned a blind eye to a situation that benefits the City of London’s own financial services industry.
A common perception in the UK, rightly or wrongly, is that the VI is seen to be sheltering oligarch funds. Is that an image we want to present to the world?
It has been said that the first casualty of war is truth. It may soon become false news that our financial service industry is being manipulated by the Russian state!
Storm preparedness
Your article covers well our slow preparedness to receive large cruise ships, but we are less than a month away from what is widely expected to become another season of above-average storm activity and yet in many ways we are less prepared for that than we were last year. Let’s consider just four illustrations of the critical problems that need to be addressed.
Firstly, a solitary mobile canteen that was reportedly abandoned near the top of Fort Hill long before Irma blocked a critical part of the Ridge Road after the storm, yet today herds of derelict vehicles are waiting to be blown across roads throughout Tortola and sheets of galvanised roofing lurk in the undergrowth waiting to be launched into the air as missiles.
Secondly, the storms robbed the VI of some of its public records and local publications while leaving its historic archives precariously protected against the elements and without even a public library headquarters in which to house the books.
That revives questions about the reasons for rejecting New York University’s offer of $100,000 worth of funding for experts and equipment to digitise the fragile court records stored in the strong room.
Coastal defences
The third example is the state of our manmade and natural coastal defences, which an international expert has described as less recovered from the storms than elsewhere in the region, with 90 percent of Tortola’s mangroves dead or seriously degraded.
Lastly, postal and telecommunication services were widely criticised before the storms and seriously compromised by them, but have yet to recover to even their previous state. Presently, all private mail on Tortola must be collected from the small main post office in Road Town after the addressee has waited turn in long lines, as all of the district offices are still closed.