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rfmcdonaldNoel Maurer takes apart the rather imaginatively dystopic suggestion that Margaret Thatcher wanted to buy, in the late 1970s, an island in Southeast Asia to create a city-state for Indochinese boat people.
Thailand was concerned that Cambodia would be repopulated by Vietnamese, Singapore thought that Vietnam was engaging in a bit of ethnic cleansing, Malaysia apparently was willing to sink refugee ships regardless, the French were placing pressure on the British to accept as many boat people as their trans-Channel neighbour, and Thatcher's government didn't want any more immigrants. Hence, the idea of a distant island.
Unless there is more than the Archives made available, or I missed the juicy stuff in my long skim, nobody seems to have really considered the creation of a new Crown Colony in 1979. I can’t find any references to an entrepreneurial city or opposition from Lee Kwan Yew; I certainly can’t find any references to an actual transfer of sovereignty.
Judging from the documents, the story does have a grain of truth. There was a bilateral meeting between Australia and Britain, although little seems to have been discussed other than the possibility of a joint position at the U.N. conference. (Both countries had already tried and failed to get the main Western powers in for a sit-down before the U.N. meeting.) The British ambassador to Jakarta did raise the possibility of buying an island from Indonesia for an expanded refugee camp capable of housing up to 200,000 people. The thing about that is that the report about the British suggestion and the Indonesian response is phrased in vaguest possible terms. It isn’t clear who exactly would have put up the money. (I suspect that the British were thinking about the UNHCR, not HMG) It certainly isn’t clear that the use of the term “buy” meant “transfer sovereignty” as opposed to a simple land purchase.
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Judging from the documents, the story does have a grain of truth. There was a bilateral meeting between Australia and Britain, although little seems to have been discussed other than the possibility of a joint position at the U.N. conference. (Both countries had already tried and failed to get the main Western powers in for a sit-down before the U.N. meeting.) The British ambassador to Jakarta did raise the possibility of buying an island from Indonesia for an expanded refugee camp capable of housing up to 200,000 people. The thing about that is that the report about the British suggestion and the Indonesian response is phrased in vaguest possible terms. It isn’t clear who exactly would have put up the money. (I suspect that the British were thinking about the UNHCR, not HMG) It certainly isn’t clear that the use of the term “buy” meant “transfer sovereignty” as opposed to a simple land purchase.
Thailand was concerned that Cambodia would be repopulated by Vietnamese, Singapore thought that Vietnam was engaging in a bit of ethnic cleansing, Malaysia apparently was willing to sink refugee ships regardless, the French were placing pressure on the British to accept as many boat people as their trans-Channel neighbour, and Thatcher's government didn't want any more immigrants. Hence, the idea of a distant island.
