“Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.” –
(This blog post previously appeared in The National.)
The National dedicated last week to the issue of Freeports and I’m glad they did. These deregulated tax havens have not been interrogated nearly well enough by our politicians or our media and the information coming from the ports themselves – even when asked directly – has been too little and too vague. This hasn’t allowed for a proper democratic debate around their merits or demerits, has allowed their failures to go unreported and, perhaps worse, has allowed outright conspiracy theories to rise up to replace the information vacuum which has, in turn, made it harder to campaign against them on the basis of the facts on the ground (something which suits their proponents whose agenda thrives equally in an empty well of information as it does in a polluted one).
The Common Green 