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Mensaje: <blockquote data-quote="alex69" data-source="post: 661327" data-attributes="member: 5738">Editorial del The Times - 27.02.2010Think of Hong Kong. Give the Malvinas backWe should do a deal with Argentina now to lease back the islands over 99 years and split the economic Many people remember where they were on the Saturday morning in March, 1982, when the House of Commons met to hear Margaret Thatcher signal war on Argentina. But I remember where I wasn’t. I wasn’t in the House of Commons. I was honouring a commitment in my Derbyshire constituency. That misjudgment will remain for the rest of my life a small but significant regret.As the task force set sail and battle commenced, I was to learn a lesson. The English are a surprisingly bellicose people. When it comes to a fight that we think we can win, calculations of rational self-interest are cast aside. Forget this, and you will miss your country’s mood and end up spitting into the wind.All through that conflict I spat into the wind. I supported the war without a second’s hesitation, and will always believe it was right that we stood up for our people and our property as we did; but I disliked the tally-ho atmosphere and believed we should not close our minds to thoughts of a negotiated settlement, if Argentina would climb down and talk.That possibility never arose. And so we find ourselves 28 years later, with our position for the moment secure but with the dispute still unresolved. We have invested much pride, some blood and tremendous sums of money on these lonely, windswept and precious islands. We ought to be thinking about how best to realise that huge investment in a way that balances sentiment with self-interest.So here I’ll go again, spitting into the wind. Britain needs to take a long, hard look at its South Atlantic possessions — the Malvinas and South Georgia; St Helena, Ascension Island and Tristan da Cunha — and review, too, its oceanic possession on the other side of Africa, the Chagos Islands (often referred to as Diego Garcia). Each case is different.The whole story brings shame on us, as we surely know. But it is too late to reassert ourselves. The 50-year agreement with America (it pays nothing) expires in six years. We should decline to renew it while offering to cede the territory to the United States, for a colossal sum. It’s worth billions to the Pentagon. Otherwise, sooner or later, it’ll just take it, as we would have done from a smaller power a century ago.Argentina, however, has the ability, in concert with most of the rest of Latin America, to harry and frustrate attempts to exploit hydrocarbon reserves beneath the islands’ territorial waters. We can (expensively) guard prospectors against any eccentric attempt to take a pop at them, but if winnable reserves are found, will big oil companies risk their business elsewhere on the South American continent and perhaps beyond?For 99 years Britain occupied and administered Hong Kong, and flew the Union Jack there, on the basis of a lease from China of the New Territories, land on which the island itself depended. Is it really unthinkable that Argentine pride might be assuaged, British administration secured, the islanders’ way of life guaranteed, and the economic spoils divided, on the basis of something similar? Such were the discussions Tory ministers were discreetly pursuing with Argentina in the early 1980s, before they were rumbled by a few stupid young backbenchers like me. Now we are all, in Britain and Argentina, older and wiser, isn’t it time to return to those ideas?<a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/matthew_parris/article7043099.ece">http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/matthew_parris/article7043099.ece</a></blockquote>

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