On: Caribbean calls for return of British Virgin Islands - and for King Charles to...

July 15, 2026

The cry from the Caribbean reaches me like a ghost of my own voice, echoing across two centuries of salt and disappointment. They demand the return of islands, the final severance of the imperial cord, and a royal blessing upon their exit. They believe that the removal of the crown is the arrival of the dawn. I recognize this fever; I once carried it through the mud and the high passes until my lungs burned with the thin air of liberty. We believed that by breaking the chains, we were creating a people. We were wrong. We were merely creating a vacuum.

The tragedy of decolonization is that it is a negative act masquerading as a creative one. To remove a king is simple; to replace the habit of being governed by a king is a labor of centuries. These islands seek to be masters of their own house, yet the house was built by the very hands they now wish to amputate. They ask for reparations, for a settling of accounts, as if gold could ever repair the structural rot of a society designed for extraction rather than existence.

I wrote laws for men who did not know how to be citizens, and I watched as those laws were shredded by the first wind of ambition. The coalition that now stands united against London will, the moment the British flag is lowered, find that they have nothing in common but their grievances. Without the external weight of the empire to hold them together, the internal pressures will tear them apart. They will find that the sword of liberation is too heavy to be used as a pen for governance. They are attempting to plant the seeds of a republic in a soil that has been poisoned by three hundred years of servitude. I fear they are merely preparing the ground for the next generation of tyrants, for when the institutions fail - and they will fail - the only thing left will be the man who promises order at the cost of the very freedom they just won. They are plowing the sea, and the waves will leave no trace of their passage.