A dozen local people and a uniformed military police officer (“Do you mind if I sit in?”) took their seats at the back of the handsome wood-panelled courtroom that doubles as the Falkland Islands’ legislative assembly. Outside, it was a typically blowy early evening. It may nominally be spring in the south Atlantic, but Stanley harbour, with its dark grey water speckled with historical shipwrecks, was a cauldron of swells and churn.
Six of the assembly’s eight members – five men, one woman – waited patiently at a row of desks and microphones. The heating had been turned up to just short of uncomfortable. Behind them, a portrait of King Charles.
From the other walls, dusty photographs of governors, of varying popularity, gazed disinterestedly at the scene. Proceedings started at the raised hand of a bored-looking young man wearing headphones in the corner. He was transmitting the question and answer session via radio across the dozen or so inhabited islands that make up the 778-strong archipelago.
It was not clear how many of the Falklands’ 3,600 residents were listening in from their farm houses out in the diddle-dee shrub that coats much of the islands, or in the front rooms of Port Stanley’s white clapboard cottages with the pretty coloured roofs; likely not on a par with the number who learned 44 years ago from the Falkland Islands broadcasting station that their lands had been invaded. But for those who did tune in on Monday evening, there was much to dwell on. Not so much the answers about the local internet contract or the consultation on the contentious plan for a salmon farm.
That intervention prompted a little shuffling of tired bums. But a rather more significant announcement was to come. Lewis Clifton, an assembly member who can date his family’s residence on the Falklands to the late 1870s, advised the islanders that an unprecedented economic war was being waged against them – a community no bigger than an English village – by a country of 46 million people.
The British forces capability at Mount Pleasant airbase – 1,800 personnel there and on Ascension island, four typhoon jets, a ground-based air defence system and with HMS Medway patrolling the waters – makes a military threat from Argentina largely hypothetical. But Buenos Aires has launched a full spectrum attack of another sort. In response this week, Andy Burnham and his foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, restated the UK’s solidarity with the islanders’ desire to remain British, and promised legislation that might offer some protection against the financial damage imposed by Argentina’s economic sanctions.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
