All At Sea

Why has the Queensferry Crossing been built with no pedestrian access? How does such a development ever obtain approval? Similarly, ever since the privatisation and demise of Sealink, it has been impossible to board a ferry except in a motor vehicle such as some of us are medically not allowed to drive.

Remaining on the ocean waves, so what that the United States is about to sell Argentina a vessel capable of being used to invade the Falkland Islands? Until the day that Argentina took Margaret Thatcher at her word and moved into the Islands that she had thought were only three days' sailing from Britain, it had been Britain that had been about to sell Argentina, at a knocked down price, the ships that then had to be deployed by Britain against Argentina. The Republic of 1776 was on the Argentine side against the British Empire then, too. Well, of course it was.

At least four things about the Falkland Islands genuinely stagger me. First, almost no one who is vocal about them ever says anything about the Chagos Islanders. Secondly, the larger population on St Helena has never been able to dream of the kind of spending and other attention that the Falkland Islanders take for granted; indeed, the actions (or inactions) of successive British Governments, of all three parties, have now placed St Helena in an existential crisis.

Thirdly, far larger communities right here in the United Kingdom have routinely been allowed to go to the wall for the want of vastly smaller sums of money than are invariably made available to the Falkland Islands. And fourthly, depictions of them on British television always, far beyond any possibility of coincidence, depict them as inhabited solely by people who could have passed unnoticed in the rural England of the 1950s. St Helenians in Britain have watched in disbelief as entire series have failed to show a single brown face.