THE Government is considering off-loading some of us to St Helena, the South Atlantic island where Napoleon Bonaparte was exiled after his defeat at Waterloo.

The Foreign Office Minister, Baroness Symonds of Vernham Dean, told the Green Party peer, Lord Beaumont of Whitley, in the House of Lords yesterday that the Government was discussing with St Helena means of tackling the island’s depopulation.

She said that the Government was working with St Helena “to find ways of stimulating growth and inward investment, an assessment of access arrangements for the island and a review of immigration and land purchase laws”.

Lord Beaumont, speaking of St Helena said: “When you have an enormous amount of emigration, one of the ways to combat that is to encourage immigration. Where you have an island community, no matter how worthy in itself, it is rather a good idea to engage some entrepreneurship from outside.”

Anyone going to the island would need a desire to get away from it all. The island is 1,140 miles from the nearest point on the African continent and 1,800 miles from the coast of South America. It has an area of about 47 square miles, mostly rugged mountains interspersed with picturesque ravines. The administrative capital, Jamestown, has a population of just a few hundred.

But although the island is in the tropics, southeast trade winds keep the temperature “mild and equable”.

After Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte was held in exile on St Helena until he died in 1821. The island had been loaned to the British Government for the purpose of holding the deposed emperor.

Intended as a maritime base rather than a self-sufficient colony when it was annexed to the Crown in 1834, St Helena still receives an annual grant from Britain.

Its only significant exports are canned and frozen fish, high quality coffee and cottage industry products such as lace, woodwork and beadwork.

Lord Beaumont said he wanted the Government to give overseas territories reciprocal citizenship rights with Britain.

Lady Symonds replied: “Although they wanted rights of abode in Britain, they felt that granting reciprocal rights of abode would simply mean that many of these territories would be flooded with immigrants,” she said.

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