Westlake, Donald E - NF 01 by Under An English Heaven (v1.1) Read Free Book Online Page B

official they
would agree to meet. They had a secret meeting in the bush, and Phillips
promised them they would only be fined, not given jail terms, if they
surrendered in re the beauty contest. They surrendered at once, were tried in a
court on Anguilla , and both were charged with throwing
stones. Harrigan was also charged with indecent language. They pleaded guilty
and were fined and that was that.
    On February 22, the day following
his ambivalent meeting with the Anguillans, Henry Hall went back to St. Kitts
to talk things over with Bradshaw and some other people, and the day after that
he went back to Anguilla with eight statements from the
central Government. These statements narrow in on the Anguillans' specific
complaints much more than anything that had happened before in the 317 years of
British rule.
    The first two were simple
reassurances concerning local political structures, but the next four all
referred to the island's development:
    3. Projects
for Anguilla had been included in the Development Plan, including
road improvements and the construction of a jetty, and they would be carried
out accordingly.
    4. A
consultant having advised that due to the wide dispersal of housing it would be
uneconomic to set up an electricity undertaking in Anguilla, the law would be
amended to permit any person to supply power to his neighbors, and the
Government would give five to ten years' notice before withdrawing such
permission if it should thereafter propose to provide a public supply.
[Electricity wouldn't be profitable for the Government, so they'll turn it over
to private industry!]
    5. Work
had already begun under contract with Cable and Wireless to provide a telephone
service, but delay had been occasioned due solely to the United Kingdom equipment manufacturers failing to keep their
promised delivery dates; every effort would however be made to speed up
delivery.
    6. Canadian
aid had been sought and promised for providing a supply of pipe-borne water,
but distribution problems remained to be resolved—again because of the wide
dispersal of housing.
    Number seven explained why St.
Kitts couldn't afford to do any more for Anguilla financially, and Number Eight would be baffling if I weren't prepared to
explain it, which I am:
    8.
Policy reasons did not permit applications for licenses under the Aliens
Landholding Ordinance to be dealt with otherwise than by the State Government,
but any such applications would be given prompt attention.
    The Aliens Landholding Ordinance
said, in effect, that Anguillans could sell their land to one another all they
wanted, but if they wished to sell land to an off-islander—a retired American
pilot, for instance, or an English hotel builder—they had to get approval from
the central Government on St. Kitts. The idea of this was that the central
Government would have a chance to keep "undesirable elements"—such as
the Mafia— from buying land on any of the three islands. However, the
Anguillans claimed the Kittitian Government stalled forever in making
decisions about applications, and that Kittitians attempted to dissuade
prospective buyers from their Anguillan choices in order to sell them Kittitian
land instead. The result was that sales to rich foreigners of homesites were
well below the Caribbean average. The Anguillans
suffered a loss of revenue not only in the immediate sale but also in the
ongoing process of having a rich foreigner build a house and then live in it.
For an island that had damn little to sell foreigners except land, this
was a source of irritation, about which the Bradshaw Government proposed to do nothing except speed up the red tape in the
applications. (The phrase "policy reasons" leads me to believe that
British insistence on the status quo was back of this one, and that British
distrust and dislike and envy of Americans was back of the insistence.)
    The day after Mr. Hall brought these
eight statements to Anguilla , the Anguillans held
another