The press reports that the British international development secretary Andrew Mitchell has approved £200 million to be spent building an airport for the South Atlantic island of St Helena.
As its colonial British owners have long known, St Helena is best suited as a fortress of incarceration for upstarts most irritating to the empire. They include Napoleon Bonaparte and Dinuzulu kaCetshwayo and about 6 000 Boer prisoners of war.
The South African company Basil Read won the tender from the British government to design, build, operate and transfer the airport against several competitors. They dropped out chiefly, as Basil Read’s island director Deon de Jager says, because “it could not be done”.
The island has an apartheid-style society. Class distinctions are along racial lines, with British expats working for the government on top of the pile and the darker descendants of slaves and labourers imported over centuries at the lower end.
Prospects of education and wealth for them are limited. When the British established a naval station on the island in the 1840s to gain from the African slave trade across the South Atlantic, about 15 000 slaves were left there.
When news first broke of the proposals last July, MP Denis MacShane slammed it as: “A scandal of Pergau Dam proportions.”
Why? Because the decision comes after lobbying from Tory donor and £127m tax avoider Lord Ashcroft.
In July 2010, just months after the Tories came to power following an election campaign he bankrolled, Ashcroft demanded to know: “What the current plans are for an airport in St Helena?”
The Guardian reported at the time:
Ashcroft showed his commitment to the airport in December last year when he diverted his private jet, during a flight from Nairobi to Brazil, to fly low over the island.
As his jet swept over the island, Ashcroft was interviewed from the plane by a St Helena radio station. “I’m about 25,000 feet in the air descending, slowly descending at the moment so I should be over there in about 15 minutes time,” he said in the broadcast.
“I believe that you should have an airport, you should be able to open St Helena up to the world and I hope that an incoming Conservative government in due course will strongly support an airport there.”
Mitchell says the project will help boost tourism and help reduce the island’s dependency on aid, but given that £200 million earmarked for this airport is equivalent to the entire amount spent by the Department for International Development on water and sanitation in 2010, is this really the most effective use of British aid?