However, Isle of Man chief minister Allan Bell made it clear in Tynwald, the Isle of Man Parliament, today that the island’s Government has no plans or policy to change the Island’s constitutional status as a British Crown Dependency.
Answering a question from MHK Laurence Skelly, Bell said: “Now is not the time to raise a major question mark over the Island’s future that might weaken business confidence in our political and economic stability.”
Skelly had phrased his question by noting that the deputy chief minister of Jersey had recently made a “call to be ready for independence”, and asked “what if any action the [IoM] government” had taken to “identify the potential benefits” of being free of the UK.
Bell, who became chief minister last year after a decade as Treasury minister and a year as minister of economic develoment, said that the question of independence from the UK had already been examined more than a decade ago, and that based on the findings of that research and contained in a report approved by Tynewald in November 2000, "the Isle of Man government has no plans or policy to change the island’s constitutional status".
"This report was very comprehensive, and identified that while there may be some potential, albeit intangible advantages of independence, these could be heavily outweighed by the potential didsadvantages, which, I believe, remain at this point,” Bell added.
He said the governmentwould continue to "maintain awareness of circumstances which may merit revisiting, in detail, scope for independence on the part of the island".
Tax avoidance criticism
As reported, Jersey assistant chief minister Sir Philip Bailhache was quoted in the Guardian last month as saying that island "should be prepared to stand up for itself and should be ready to become independent if it were necessary in Jersey’s interest to do so".
He added that strained relations with the UK over the past five years had made it "very plain" that Jersey’s interests were not always aligned with those of Britain.
Bailhache’s comments came after sustained criticism of the island in the UK, in the wake of a Times newspaper investigation that revealed high profile people, such as comedian Jimmy Carr, were using an aggressive tax avoidance scheme based in Jersey.
Jersey has also come under the spotlight from the UK government this year, with Chancellor George Osborne announcing in his March Budget that he would target aggressive tax avoidance schemes in offshore finance centres, such as the K2 vehicle which Carr was found using.
Independence talk has reappeared periodically on both islands since the global financial crisis prompted the UK to take a firmer linewith respect to its finances, and as UK politicians have sought to blame offshore "tax havens" for financial problems and for enabling wealthy UK individuals and corporations to avoid and evade their tax obligations.
Manx nationalist sentiments first began to rise in 2009, and an organisation called Mannin Aboo ("the Isle of Man forever") was formed after the UK decided to scrap a reciprocal health agreement (RHA) it had with the island, and made changes to a VAT-sharing agreement that reduced the island’s budget by a fifth. (A new (RHA) was subsequently set up between the UK and the IoM in 2010.)
The situation was not helped by a reference by then-UK chancellor Alistair Darling to the Isle of Man as a "tax haven sitting in the Irish Sea", or the failure of the Isle of Man subsidiary of Iceland’s Kaupthing Singer Friedlander, which left thousands of Isle of Man depositors out of pocket, amid rumours that some £550m of deposits had been transferred to the bank’s UK affiliate just before its collapse.
