Annexed nation

Simon Hobson

Asides from demonstrating the irresponsible and poor leadership qualities most people have expected of the incoming President of the United States of America, Donald Trump vocalising his schoolboy fantasies of annexing Greenland, the Panama Canal and Canada brings into sharp focus the many nations still living under control of an external governments authority: their human and natural resources too strong an addiction for the colonial master to relinquish.

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Ice and a canal

The recently deceased 39th President of the United States of America, Jimmy Carter, negotiated the treaty which returned the Panama Canal from US control to the government of Panama.

The canal was reverted to Panamanian control at the end of 1999. An event which marked the end of the beginning of what is proving to be over one hundred and twenty years of the US making claims to the Panamanian isthmus.

This is just a single ongoing diplomatic tension emanating from the United States, one of many, which have leached, and eradicated, central and southern America of resources, entrepreneurs and political statesmen.

Over 74 years ago the US signed an agreement with the Danish government in a pledge to protect Greenland from attack. Then the anticipated perpetrator of military action against the world’s largest island was the USSR, today it’s from the signatory of that accord.

But beyond the prospect of a conflict between two of the founding members of NATO — a situation which could not have been better orchestrated by Vladimir Putin himself — the government of Greenland disputes the authority of Copenhagen to decide its foreign and defence policy.

Achieving the status of autonomous territory in 2009, the 56,000 inhabitants of the Artic lands, desire absolute liberty from their forced incorporation into the Kingdom of Denmark. Greenland has a wealth of mineral and scientific resources from which it wants to shape and finance its own future.

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A quite revolution

Canada, more specifically Québec, has lived through many skirmishes and two major invasions from the United States, the last of these being in 1812. Since those aggressions, the nation of Québec has also shaken off both French and British colonial rule, only to be absorbed into a federalised Canada.

As a result of two referendums asking the people of Québec to consider their place within Canada, the nation has seen the repatriation of powers over its economy, justice, taxation, immigration, culture and language. Despite this, Québec continues to be threatened from Ottawa though economic and cultural undermining. A situation expected to worsen if the Conservatives win the upcoming federal elections.

But the confidence to affirm their rights, as citizens of a distinct nation, only came to Québec in the 1960s. Throwing off the oppressive control of the Catholic Church and Anglophone business owners, Québecers undertook the Révolution tranquille.

The reforms which this ‘Quite revolution’ brought in lowered the voting age to 18 years, gave everyone access to education — for the first time in French — healthcare, pensions, encouraged Québec based industry and mining firms, nationalised energy and electricity production — today that national energy firm has assets totalling $93 billion — and expanded the government budget through increased borrowing.

Québec now finds itself with an economy comparable to Sweden and Ireland. It is a nation ready to go it alone, not join the United States.

Grain of treachery   

A little over a decade ago, Putin began annexing parts of the Ukrainian nation. In Westminster, parliamentary members have stood up to condemn that action.

The more informed among them, point to the appropriation by Putin of Ukrainian resources such as stores of wheat, coal, natural gas, oil: in his awarding mining rights to Russian companies for lithium and rare earth minerals and, the thieving of agricultural and industrial machinery. Activities which denude Ukraine’s economy of foreign currency and damages the lives of people in Ukraine and the wider region. These actions are rightly condemned by our representatives in Westminster.

Over 500 years have passed since England completed its annexation of Wales. Furthering English imperial ambitions, this invasion of our nation enriched the English royal family and its associated elites.

Since 1535, the colonisation of Cymru has seen the arrogation of its; timber, livestock, fish, salt, stone, aggregates, slate, iron ore, copper, lead, zinc, tin, gold, silver, natural gas, oil and, most famously, its coal — not to mention the destruction of its unique legal system, culture and language.

Today, much of our nation’s water is ‘owned’ by private companies who make vast profits from a resource belonging to the citizens of Wales.

But the new desire of our imperial masters in London, is the extraction of renewable energy: wind, tidal, hydro, geothermal, solar, biomass and hydrogen. Chief benefactor of these riches is once again, the English royal family, via His Majesty’s Treasury in London and, companies whose profits land in banks outside of Wales. Our nation’s marine energy potential, alone, has an export market estimate of £76 billion. Combining this with the broader economic value of the energy and environment sector, and Cymru has renewable energy assets to be realised of more than £80 billion.

Indifferent duplicity

In their denouncing of Putin’s criminal actions in Ukraine and, condemnation of Trump’s sophomoric approach to international diplomacy, the United Kingdom’s leaders, the supporters of the status quo, are guilty of hypocrisy.

Ready to stand up and preach on the infractions of international law and the degradation of other people’s rights outside of the United Kingdom, while the people who vote them into power, us, suffer.

The barbarity of England’s monarchs in their plundering of Wales’ resources, is not a footnote of our island’s history, because it is this mindset, of our nation remaining the annexed property of London, which perpetuates in the minds of the United Kingdom government and many who sit on the green and red benches in the houses.

In their failure to rectify these economically predatory actions, Westminster’s parliamentarians trip themselves in their moral contradiction. Seemingly lost in their indoctrinated view of right and wrong - whereby what is Wales’, is in fact England’s.

Simon Paul Hobson is an approved Parliamentary candidate for the Liberal Democrats.