TOMORROW will be the 40th anniversary of the dispatch of the Naval Task Force charged with, and ultimately successful in, liberating the Falkland Islands. Yet there are still plenty of people who will complain about “liberating” in that sentence, and for that matter, Falklands, insisting that they are instead the Islas Malvinas.

That’s not surprising when those involved are Argentine, like the country’s foreign minister, Santiago Cafiero, who was banging on about their claim on the island the other day. It’s more irritating when they belong to that section of the British Left whose entire approach to foreign policy is to assume that whichever side the UK (or the US or Israel) is on must automatically be the wrong one. There is and was no shortage of them, even while the Falklands Conflict (as we called it then) was being conducted.

The Argentine claim to the islands is embarrassingly thin on any basis other than geographic proximity, which isn’t even all that proximate – the Falklands are more or less the same distance from the Patagonian coast as Shetland is from Norway. And geographical considerations often don’t have much to do with sovereignty; Greenland is a long way from Denmark, and Guam is not just 7,000 miles from the US, but on the other side of the International Date Line.

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Trivia fans may know that France and the Netherlands share a border, despite Belgium being between the two. It’s located on the island of Saint Martin in the Caribbean; Sint Maarten is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, with the same theoretical status as the Netherlands itself, while St Martin, as a French overseas collectivity, is represented in the French and EU parliaments.

Despite geography, the first undisputed landing in the Falklands was by a English captain in 1690, almost 200 years before Argentina existed, and different bits of them were simultaneously but separately settled by the French and British about 70 years later. Those settlements may not even have known of each other’s existence, and anyway, the French gave up their claim to the Spanish within a year or two. Then Britain had them again, until everybody largely gave up on them.

Argentina’s principle presence after that was giving permission to a German trader to set up for about four years in the 1820s, after which Britain reclaimed the place, and (bar the ten weeks of occupation in 1982) has held them ever since. But both the geography and the history of the place are largely irrelevant, anyway.

What matters is the inhabitants’ view on sovereignty and, thanks to a referendum in 2013, in which 99.8 per cent voted to remain a British Overseas Territory, that’s pretty conclusive.

One reason for that startlingly unanimous opinion, of course, might have been the experience and memory of having been invaded, something that people in most territories tend to object to, to put it mildly.

Given the terrible events and deceitful rhetoric of the past few weeks, we should be more acutely aware than ever that any claims about history, natural geography, sovereignty, what constitutes liberation, or supposed rights over territory or of access must correspond with those of the people living there.

To his cost, Vladimir Putin has discovered (though he’s still hiding it from his own citizens) that his descriptions of what Ukrainians want, or which bits of territory belong to them, are wildly at odds with the Ukrainians’ own assessment. It’s also been amazingly counterproductive, from the point of view of bolstering his own position and ambitions. For example, it now seems quite likely that Finland will join Nato and, if it holds out, that Ukraine will join the EU.

It would be nice if his regime suffered the same consequences as the Argentine junta did after the Falklands War, when General Galtieri was deposed and the country returned to democratic government.

Thankfully, despite their persistence in laying claim to the islands, there is no resemblance between the current Argentine government and Putin’s, and a renewed attempt to invade looks utterly unimaginable. But that doesn’t mean that the Falkland Islanders don’t have good reason to be defensive; Britain’s track record of looking after the inhabitants of its overseas territories is not one we can really be proud of. In both the late 1960s and 70s, diplomats were cheerfully considering handing the islands over without, apparently, having given any thought at all to what the residents wanted.

More recently, we were shockingly dismissive of the interests of the people of Montserrat, two-thirds of whom had to be evacuated after a volcano in the mid-1990s. The reaction of the Labour International Development Secretary at the time, Clare Short, was to moan that these evacuees would be “asking for golden elephants next”. Hong Kong, a more problematic case because much of the territory was leased rather than owned outright, nonetheless shows just how much residents stand to lose under other authorities. And while the UK has improved its response to former overseas citizens there, we could and should do much more.

Of the other remaining territories, including Bermuda, Anguilla, Gibraltar, the British Virgin Islands and so on, hardly any have population of more than a few tens of thousands, so offering them the same rights and protections as the citizens of say, the original Falkland in Fife, would hardly be controversial – and certainly apply to far fewer people than former colonies in the Commonwealth.

It could, in other words, be a bit more like the French or Dutch systems, and allow for some representation in the UK parliament, where decisions about their defence and financial support are made. Whether to take up such a system would, naturally, be a matter for the citizens of those places themselves to decide. It probably wouldn’t be suitable, for example, for places that are merely military bases, such as the canton in Cyprus or Diego Garcia, or research facilities, like the British Antarctic Territory.

We already have, much nearer to home, several rather constitutionally odd semi-detached examples, often with similar off-shore or quasi-freeport status to those of say, the Cayman Islands. Why shouldn’t Gibraltar, the Falklands or the Pitcairn or Turks and Caicos Islands be regarded more like the Channel Islands, or the Isle of Man? The Falklands War was a rare example of the UK doing what was undoubtedly the right thing, and defending the interests of those whose loyalty put us in their debt. We should apply its lesson more widely.

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