George Orwell famously described Britain as “a family with the wrong members in control […] in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bedridden aunts.” When it comes to Britain’s underutilised overseas territories, we can extend the analogy: Britain is like a cash-poor, asset-rich elderly woman who has somehow inherited a portfolio of scattered, high value properties she doesn’t know what to do with. Naive, unworldly, preoccupied with the global equivalent of donkey charities, Britain seems currently doomed to squander its underused inheritance. The overseas territories and their potential were notably absent from Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s growth speech today.
Donald Trump’s push to annex Greenland, which has left the Danish government reportedly “freaked out” and “in crisis mode” highlights a new era for Europe’s far-flung relics of empire. Those satellite territories can either be fully integrated into the motherland, as France has done with its overseas territories, or underutilised, risking the covetous eyes of neighbours newly emboldened by the dawning era of raw power and territorial aggrandisement. When the President, whose foreign policy vision has been aptly described as “the Monroe Doctrine and Mars” by the analyst Stephen Wertheim, demands territory from a loyal Nato ally like Denmark, there is really very little Denmark, Nato or the EU can do to stop him. With the ruthlessly acquisitive eye of a real estate developer, Trump has identified Greenland as a high-value, underutilised property ripe for hostile takeover and development. The Danes aren’t using it, therefore, in Trump’s eyes, they deserve to lose it.
Britain, which possesses plenty of underutilised Greenlands of its own, should take note. The Labour government’s desperate bid to give away the Chagos Island surely makes Britain’s continued possession of its other territories increasingly risky. With his real estate mogul’s eye, Trump has even talked up Gaza’s potential as a beachfront development opportunity, declaring that with “the weather, the water, the whole thing, the climate… it could be one of the best places in the world”. What would prevent Trump, who repeatedly declares his apparently serious desire to annex Canada and the Panama Canal as well as Greenland, turning his attention to the infinitely more attractive British Virgin Islands, Bermuda, Anguilla, the Turks and Caicos or Cayman Islands? They are, of course, only a short hop from his Florida palace.
The tech entrepreneur Dryden Brown, an ally of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and America’s new Trump-aligned tech oligarchy, views Greenland as a new American wilderness to be exploited. He calls it “an economically underutilised […] rare reopening of a frontier, which will coalesce true pioneers.” In his mind, it would include the construction of a futuristic network city in its frozen wastes serving as a real-world testing ground to “prototype terraforming solutions to improve extreme, harsh conditions, potentially to be used off-world”. It is a vision of glittering cities, geodesic domes and nuclear-powered data centres analogous to, and directly influenced by, Anglofuturism. Indeed, Brown has been quoted by the Anglofuturist writer Tom Ough as offering to build geodesic domes to develop the British Antarctic Territory as an oil and mineral-rich development zone, in what Ough claims may be “the best place in the world for certain forms of industrial activity”. Ough calls it “a source of tremendous wealth” whose development “would allow us to claim the bonanza that could rescue us from our national decline”.
Much the same could be said of Britain’s most obvious underutilised Greenland parallel, the Falkland Islands and South Georgia, currently used only as a location for sheep rearing and diplomatic headaches. Sitting on a vast and never-used oil field, the Falkland Islands hold the potential to subsidise mainland Britain’s infrastructural development, a second chance at national prosperity granted as if by a benevolent God, following Margaret Thatcher’s frittering way of the North Sea oil bounty. But more than this, the Falklands’ vast panoramas of windswept hillsides and moorlands present a seductive vision, to young Britons stifled by the motherland’s repressive senescence, of a second highland Britain overseas, empty and ripe for adventurous development.
The British state makes its overseas territories intentionally hard for mainland Britons to emigrate to, keeping them underdeveloped and at risk of foreign annexation, the precise opposite to France’s model of integrating them tightly with the metropole. Westminster may be run by timid “bedridden aunts” but the UK still possesses untamed frontiers of its own, whose development can make the motherland prosperous once again. Cash poor but asset rich, Britain sits on an enviable property portfolio idly waiting to be used. If we don’t, others surely will.
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SubscribeWell said. If you have it, you should USE it. Indeed.
Indeed.
The Falklands oil and gas has been known about for several decades. Why has nothing been done ? Is it going to take a Milei-Trump joint venture to actually get this moving ? I’d be happy leaving them to get on with it and paying us some royalties, rather than wasting this huge opportunity.
It’s almost as if we can’t do anything for ourselves in this country any more. 1) can’t exploit our own oil and gas, even though we were pioneers in offshore fields (and fracked Wych Farm in Dorset decades ago). 2) can’t design and build our own nuclear, even though we were the first to do it. 3) can’t build a high speed railway, even though we invented railways. 4) can’t run competent, small civil service government, even though we invented it. 5) can’t provide affordable housing for British people, even though we managed to fine from about 1920-1980. 6) can’t run a proper legal system, even though we showed the world how to do it. I’m sure others can add more examples.
Ditto, aerospace and shipbuilding.
We’re also hopeless at most of the sports we invented. Except World Championship snooker, which is the UK equivalent of the World Series of baseball..
Lest we forget that the beautiful, prosperous and strategic island of Malta voted overwhelmingly (almost 80% on a 60% turnout) for full political integration with the United Kingdom in 1956 – and was simply ignored by Her Majesty’s Government.
More Unherd rubbish. Aren’t the Falkland Islands planning to drill for oil anyway ignoring Labour pressure not to? The Falklands are free to do what they want to do.
UK has to deal with its own economic problems at home. First by recognising what they are and then acting.
We aren’t even allowed to say what our problems are under this vile Labour government.
Unherd do better please.
So…Thatcher “frittered away” the North Sea oil bounty”…
In which ways was this done? And what alternative should have been adopted?
It is a lefty critique that has been around for ages. A quick google produced this random sample from the Guardian in 2013:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/apr/19/north-sea-oil-80s-boom
“Not fixing the roof while the sun shone”, the favourite Tory accusation against the Blair/Brown regime, held true in spades for the way oil receipts were spent in the Thatcher years. Other countries – Norway is the leading example – used their tax on oil to modernise infrastructure and industry, or hoarded some of it in a sovereign wealth fund for the proverbial rainy day. Instead the Treasury used every last pound of it to set against current expenditure, leaving nothing for capital projects or the post-Thatcher future. No roofs were fixed: in this respect, Mrs Thatcher as the prudent housewife is a piece of make-believe.
There is an argument that the money WAS used to modernise industry. Those industries which were unviable became defunct and the money was used to pay the social costs of their demise. Viable industries survived.
The alternative was to prop up failing industries as long as could he done…rather more costly and there would have been an end eventually. Even Healey understood this…although he had to be forced to understand and admit it, by the IMF.
She could have set up a national wealth fund, like the Nordics have.
You consider the State is best at investing money wisely, than, for example, you?
I rather think history may well be against that view…
It would have dug us out of the public debt hellhole we are in. I think the state should keep it’s nose out of most things, but there are exceptions.
It has been successfully done in other countries. As well as Norway, Singapore and the Gulf States are prime examples.
Not really. Population of Norway one twelfth of the population of the UK, with similar sized reserves. Also, Norway has plentiful hydro power, so doesn’t need to use that much of its own gas.
The Falkland islands have two main islands- East and West Falkland. Almost everyone in the country lives in Port Stanley on the far east of East Falkland. Travel west from Stanley for 50 miles of rough, deserted terrain made famous by the Royal Marines 40 years ago and you reach Port San Carlos. Cross Falkland Sound (not easy in rough weather) and go 80 miles South West through uninhabited sheep grazing land and then cross Queen Charlotte Bay and you arrive on Weddell Island.
Weddell island is privately owned. It has a good harbour and a population of five at the busiest times. Once you are there, without local knowledge and access to vehicles, getting back to Port Stanley is almost impossible.
And so it is an ideal place for Britain’s first illegal immigrant internment camp.
Dinghy across the channel. Picked up en-route. Landed at Dover where you are arrested. Coach trip to Brize Norton. Next flight to Mount Pleasant with a refuelling stop on Ascension. Escorted to Weddell where you are assigned a bunk in a Nissen hut. Diet of mainly lamb and mutton (good for all religions). No phone signal. Day after day of rain and wind. A job growing vegetables and maintaining the settlement. Pretty soon you will be begging for re-repatriation to your homeland.
Now that’s what I call a good use of our overseas territories.
Brilliant! And that’d stop the boats faster than a broadside from a Royal Navy frigate.
I really enjoy the tough guy fantasies that you fellas have – really comical!
You think we’re tough guys for recommending putting illegals on West Falkland – you should see what Trump is going to do on Gitmo!
He’ll do nothing. He’s as incompetent as he is stupid and mean spirited.
And you people worship him – how humiliating!
You makee the big joke, yes?
The joke is currently living in the White house, sport.
I think you should drink a lot more champagne. It helps when having to deal with reality!
David Eades
I have been calling for this for years. Who needs Rwanda when we have the ideal deterrent location under our own control.
Unless 2TK gives it away
It’s not just Britain, it’s all of Europe, which is stale, stagnant and anaemic under the heavy curtains of leftist ideology.
Real and lasting institutional regime change is needed, otherwise none of these ideas, goods they are, will ever happen.
The UK is a shadow of it’s former self, just accept it and move on. Increasingly irrelevant as the 21st century moves along. Like most of Europe it lives in past glory of empire. If it wasn’t for tourism , like most of Europe, the economy would be in dire straights.
You must be joking- we’ve had more than enough Empire in Britain’s post-Partition inland empire…
Falkland waters are also very rich in fish. Fully exploited by Japanese, Korean, Russian and Chinese boats but, apparently, too far from home for our own unambitious fishing industry.
Interesting argument. There is one point I’ll make and it has to be stated quite a lot: you are not supposed to take Donald Trump literally when he talks about annexing Canada and Greenland. That stuff is just for the consumption of his US voter base. However it is not meaningless: Trump also knows that the Arctic is developing rapidly into a geostrategic competition that potentially turns the Russian Federation from a distant foe on the other side of the planet to a very much more immediate foe on the other side of a thawing ice cap.
The USA’s northern horizon, therefore, demands an Arctic strategy of equal importance to it’s Atlantic and Pacific strategies. You might take issue with how Trump communicates on the subject, but nobody should doubt that the USA faces this pressing concern that has to be dealt with urgently.