A caller to the Speak Out BVI radio programme aired on July 21, 2015 on ZBVI 780 FM has questioned whether the Virgin Islands has to accept every policy that is proposed by the United Kingdom and even suggested that the territory seek to manage even more of its own affairs. Photo: VINO/File

Host of the Speak out BVI show, Douglas Wheatley. Photo: VINO/File

The caller also claimed that the banning of capital punishment as proposed by the UK and accepted by the VI has contributed to the rise in crime rate in the territory.

“They messed up the country in the first place by banning capital punishment…and now here full of murders and we have to feed them for the rest of their lives…because they say that too many people on death row…”

The death penalty was abolished for murder in 1991 (controversially), and was subsequently also removed for the last remaining offences (piracy and treason) in 2001.

One of the most famous cases of the death penalty being applied in the Virgin Islands was in the trial and execution of Arthur William Hodge for the murder of a slave; the only time a British subject was ever executed for killing a slave.

Regarding the abolition of the death penalty, host of the show Douglas Wheatley said the territory didn’t respond when it was notified what was going to happen.

“We had an opportunity to express our views to the UK about it but for some reason we as a territory didn’t. For places like Bermuda they responded and it wasn’t automatic for them.

“But sometime we don’t respond to those things and so it just happens but we have a right like anybody else in the world where if we have a difference in opinion we can make those views and ideas known to the British Government and have a dialogue going. I think that we are entitled to do that and that is what we ought to do,” Wheatley said.

Do we have to “swallow” everything the UK says?

According to the caller, “we have a big problem in the BVI where England say this and England say that and we just swallow it down…now they send down saying that who born here can’t get passport.

The British Nationality Act of 1981 was put in place by the UK to restrict children of non-nationals from becoming citizens until they were adults.

“Right now we passport got to go England and it takes about four to five weeks to get a passport, to come back here, and they ask us a set a foolishness…about where our grandmother was born…I sent an application about two weeks and a man called me some day to say something was missing from the form.

“I tell the guy my mother born Santo Domingo,” the caller said, explaining that his mother came to the Virgin Islands in the 20’s or 30’s and that she grew up in the VI. “Now they asking me where she born and that kind of foolishness what England coming and saying…for God sake.”

The caller also expressed the fear that the UK would soon want to impose same-sex marriages in the territory.

“Now they saying that man must marry to man and woman must marry to woman. Who gave Queen Elizabeth that power?…Who supposed to change that standard?”

“Hey come on man, we got to wake up man, we got to try to run our own affairs.”