Treasure Islands - Nicholas Shaxson [113]
He met an old childhood acquaintance, now a chartered accountant, drunk in a pub, and told him all about his recent experiences in India and Malaysia. “No interest. He was in a bubble: last night’s party, which car I was driving, who’s screwing whom—that was it. I can’t tell you how much of a shock it was to come back. There were really extreme views I was picking up on in Jersey: deep racism; sexism; the repressive feel; the awful in-your-face and aggressive consumerism I’d never seen before—and an almost fanatical hatred of any progressive ideas.”
Progressive legislation takes years to seep to Jersey from outside. Britain abolished its antisodomy laws in 1967, but Jersey only repealed its law, under subtle pressure from an embarrassed Britain, in 1990. “There was this ‘don’t speak out’ mentality,” Christensen said. “In London, all my mates had taken antiracism, and stuff like that, as normal. Back in Jersey, I got, ‘You don’t do that here, sonny.’”
He turned up at a cocktail party on a motorcycle and was assailed by a guest, a senior Jersey business figure, who said his crash helmet was an infringement on his liberty. “He was anti-seatbelts, anti-tax, and anti-government. He would say apartheid was good for black South Africans; that we should reestablish colonialism; that ‘these people’ had been much better off under white governments.” Christensen clashed with Sir Julian Hodge, a pillar of the Jersey banking establishment: “a mega-apologist for apartheid; a mega-pusher for empire; a libertarian beyond anything I’ve met.” He remembers a stand-up row at a public meeting with the Reverend Peter Manton, a Jersey senator and Anglican minister who had also said publicly that “the blacks” in South Africa were better off under apartheid than anywhere else (Manton was subsequently prosecuted for sex offenses and later died).
Offshore can feel like an adolescent fantasy of the world, where white men sort things out over Scotch whisky and see the rest of the world as a consumable resource. At a government committee meeting exploring sexual discrimination and equal opportunities for women, Christensen remembers a senior politician made a show of falling asleep and snoring. Another politician, who ran his own business, went further. “He said, ‘If any of my girls got pregnant I would sack them immediately: nobody wants to see a pregnant girl behind the desk.’ That is how he referred to all women—girls.”
“The ruling classes realize they don’t need to worry about the Democrats coming to power in the U.S., or Social Democrats coming to power in Germany, or Labour coming to power in Britain,” Christensen continued. “They realized they didn’t need to fight the fight at home: they already had this flotsam and jetsam of the empire strewn across the globe, with their red post boxes and British ways of life, and incredible subservience to the English ruling class. In Jersey I was amazed by how fawning the local politicians were to outsiders with money. There was this idea, ‘We can take over our own little places, and the locals will be grateful to us. The checks and balances aren’t there; the press isn’t there; and they resent interference from outsiders.’ Happy Days: Wall Street and the City gentlemen had found a way around the threat of democracy.”
Offshore attitudes are characterized by amazing similarities of argument, of approach, and of method, and some striking psychological affinities, in a geographically diverse but like-minded global cultural community of offshore. A peculiar mixture of characters populates this world: castle-owning members of old continental European aristocracies, fanatical