The TCI and UK continue ramp up efforts to improve their working relation, and strengthen the bound between the territory and Her Majesty’s Government.
The Governor’s Office says that in the past two weeks, the TCI has had significant engagement with the UK; with the Royal Navy conducting exercises off the country’s coast; Commando Engineers deploying with the local Regiment and RFA WAVE KNIGHT being moored in Grand Turk.
This engagement also included the Secretary General of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (CPA UK), Stephen Twigg, visiting Grand Turk and meeting leaders and elected representatives from across the islands.
Members of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association from Westminster also visited to provide training to the newly elected members of the House of Assembly, so they can better discharge their legislative and oversight responsibilities.
Governors from the TCI’s sister Caribbean Overseas Territories of Anguilla, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands and Montserrat also travelled to the TCI to attend a Caribbean Governor’s conference chaired by the Director of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office’s Overseas Territories Directorate (OTD) – with the Governor of Cayman joining the conference via video link.
Premier Misick, supported by the Deputy Governor and Attorney General, was also able to meet the various territory leaders over lunch.
OTD Director, Paul Candler, and Deputy Director, Adam Pile, were in TCI not only to host this conference but also to spend time understanding the country. The British Airways flight they arrived on included the fifth batch of vaccines from the UK Government.
They were briefed in detail on national security, policing and crown land. Visits were made to the Maritime Police, Radar Station, the port, the Detention Centre, the hospital, national laboratory and Her Majesty’s Prison (HMP) on Grand Turk.
The contingent toured TCI, seeing the beauty of the islands’ coastline from air, land and sea, along with the boom in the TCI’s top end construction sector through to the unregulated settlements of Dockyard. Environmental officers also took them out on patrol so they could understand local maritime protection.
Director Candler and Deputy Pile met with the Premier and his Cabinet; the Deputy Governor and Attorney General, and had lunch with the Leader of the Opposition and the Opposition’s Appointed Member.
They spent time with finance and health officials; the DDME, including the UK military liaison officer; crucially spending with a group representing the TCI youth and also meeting a wide range of stakeholders from all facets of TCI society including public and private sector, NGO’s and the local media.
The UK contingent also had the opportunity to have dinner with the Premier and Deputy Premier to build a constructive relationship with the new Government and its leadership.
Newly appointed to his role, this was Mr Candler’s first visit to an inhabited overseas Territory and it was not coincidental he chose TCI first.
The success that TCI has enjoyed over the last 18 months, weathering the initial period of the pandemic from a health perspective, rolling out the vaccines to deliver a vaccination rate of over 70%, the significant rebound of the economy and the fact it may emerge from the pandemic stronger than it entered, suggests that much is going well in TCI and there are underpinning fundamentals that TCI has worked hard to embed, over the last decade, that are worth learning from in the UK Government’s relationships with other Overseas Territories. Mr. Candler said that the optimism for the future was ‘palpable and real’.
Governor Dakin, who is now entering his third year as Governor, says that it was striking to him that in almost every conversation, with every sector of society and community, and every stakeholder in its future, the importance around issues of ‘identity’, expressed from very different perspectives, and every different perspective, were raised by those speaking to the UK visitors.
The Governor noted that the issue impacts on opportunities linked to wealth creation, employment, health, education, child safe-guarding, policing, security, long term stability and much else.
He says that over the last week this well-founded ‘hope’ for the future prosperity, yet also this ‘fear’ around who is – and who is not – part of the future TCI nation – seems to him to mark TCI out as an Overseas Territory different from the rest.
Governor Dakin went on to say that the positive point, on the latter, was how respectful to different positions each person who raised this had been, and he believes the visitors would have been struck by the constructive tone of the debate they heard, most particularly from the younger generation that they met.
