From Socialist Worker, No. 118, 19 April, pp. 2–3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
IN JANUARY 1935 there were what the Governor of the Leeward Islands, Sir R. St. Johnston, called in his report ‘some troubles’ on the island of St.Kitts. Leaders of the newly-formed Sugar Workers’ League, protesting at the rate of pay (one shilling a day), marched around the plantations calling a strike.
The Governor found this especially annoying, because he was having a garden party at the time. He summoned up a frigate and a few platoons of infantry were sent out on the streets.
Three strike leaders were shot and 50 strikers injured.
‘I also intimated,’ wrote the Governor, ‘without unnecessarily alarming people, that the garden party had better be concluded while there was still daylight for people to get to their homes.’
Gunboats and infantry platoons have been the stock in trade of the sugar planters in the smaller West Indian islands ever since the first robbers and pirates (most of whose descendants are now sitting in the House of Lords) went to the West Indies.
They drove out the indigenous Caribs, introduced African slaves, turned the slaves into wage slaves when slavery became unprofitable, and devoted themselves for nearly 200 years to reaping sugar and profit from the blood of the labourers.
The plantocracy of the smaller ‘sugar islands’ – notably Barbados, Antigua and St. Kitts – are one of the most ruthlessly reactionary ruling classes in world history. As sugar has declined in value, as industrial countries have relied increasingly upon beet, and as prices have fallen, so the planters have clung even more tenaciously to their privileges.
The full force of their venom was turned on the rising trade unions and their leaders. They forced the British Governors to pass laws dividing the constituencies into seats which they could rig, and, when the rigging failed, passed a ‘law’ banning trade union leaders from sitting in the island parliaments.
The law was championed by Moody Stuart, managing director of the Antigua Syndicate Estates, which owned most of the island, and who at the same time was a leading member of both Legislative and Executive Councils.
Trade union leaders were bullied, threatened, even murdered. But nothing could stop the unions, and, gradually they formed themselves into political parties.
Manley in Jamaica, Adams in Barbados, Bird in Antigua, Bradshaw in St. Kitts, Joshua in St. Vincent, Gary in Grenada – all these men who later became prime ministers started as union leaders in the fight against the planters.
This is the background to the situation in Anguilla. For 120 years Anguilla has been ruled as part of a federation - first of the Leeward Islands and then of St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla.
Nowhere in the West Indies were the planters more resistant to change than in St. Kitts. Consequently perhaps, nowhere were the sugar workers more courageous in their support for their trade union and labour leaders.
It was the planters who first sowed the seeds of hatred and jealousy between one island and the other – dividing themselves into small island castes, angry and suspicious at any sign of co-operation with anyone else. The hatred between the planters on St. Kitts for their brothers and cousins in Nevis was outstanding.
The leader of the St. Kitts Sugar Workers’ Union, Robert Bradshaw, became prime minister of St. Kitts in 1966, winning all seven of the seats in the island.
The planters, who had tolerated him under British rule, decided to fight him when Britain pulled out. To procure a base, they financed and organised an ‘independence movement’ in Anguilla, and organised a military coup in St. Kitts on June 10, 1967.
The coup failed. But the planters have continued by every means they know to attempt to unseat Bradshaw.
All this merely demonstrated the planters’ stupidity, for Bradshaw and his party in power were not committed to an overthrow of the class system, not of the plantocracy. They sought means to pacify the planters, and to entice British and American industry to assist tourist development in Frigate Bay and in Nevis.
Despite the victories of the Sugar Workers’ union in the late 1940s, Bradshaw quickly discovered that in his isolated island there was little room even for ordinary trade union reforms. He passed a Minimum Wage Act and an Industrial Injuries Act but in terms of any real encroachment on the plantocracy or the new, ‘dynamic’ tourist-orientated upper class, he made no gains.
He could rely upon almost endless electoral support – but the enthusiasm of that support could only be maintained as long as the planters continued playing cops and robbers from Anguilla.
Despite heavy subsidies from the St. Kitts government (amounting to twice the island’s revenue) in 1966, the self-styled Anguillan ‘leaders’ declared UDI in May 1967.
Bradshaw insisted on some form of federal structure and a series of conferences were held, mainly in Barbados. As the conferences continued it became clear that the men in charge in Anguilla did not want to agree to anything.
They wanted an island without government or elections or taxes, a gambler’s and hotelier’s paradise. They wanted another Nassau (Sir Stafford Sands, former Prime Minister of the Bahamas was paid several million dollars in ‘consultancy fees’ by Meyer Lansky of the Florida Mafia).
The British government was perplexed. What to do next? As always, they got their answer from America.
The policy of the Central Intelligence Agency is not, as sometimes imagined, to support arch reactionaries in every cause. It is concerned primarily to ensure a ‘peaceful environment’ for profit-making.
For the CIA, better a helpless majority government than a racialist and reactionary minority one.
The CIA gave their orders – smash the Anguillan ‘revolt’. Take sides with Bradshaw against the planters. Seek to settle a dangerously explosive situation with gunboats and diplomats.
But the Anguilla operation was ham-fisted. And in spite of appeals by the Antiguan Labour prime minister, Bird, to ‘keep calm’, 8,000 Antiguans marched through the streets to protest at the interference of British troops.
The arrival of British troops in Anguilla replaced one set of gangsters with another. Anguillan nationalism is an abstraction, invented by New York and Florida businessmen, but equally the ‘peaceful environment’ sought by the intervention of the British troops, is a recipe for another 100 years of exploitation.
The demand for the removal of British troops must be unequivocal and unconditional – not because ‘Anguilla wants independence’ as sugar-owning Tory MPs would have it, but in the hope that the West Indian working people – one of the most potentially revolutionary forces in the third world – will themselves shake off the shackles of plantocracies and CIA-inspired ‘peaceful environments’ and run all their islands in their own interests.
Last updated on 13 January 2021