Early Article: Why British Antarctica Should Be Settled and Developed

The vast majority of the UK’s mineral wealth lies undiscovered in the vast icy territory. It offers a test and challenge worthy of a national effort.

Cassie Matias/Two people standing on a snow field in Antarctica

This article by Tom Ough will be published on Palladium Magazine on July 3, 2025.

In January this year, a diplomatic curio was unearthed: a British request, issued in 1917, that Copenhagen give London first refusal on any sale of Greenland. The last Danish minister for the island, Tom Høyer, said that Denmark had agreed to the request.

The U.S. is currently at the front of the line; could Britain push past? Probably not. Martin Rosenbaum, a journalist who searched the British National Archives in February, found no evidence of such an agreement. Besides, one suspects that an arrangement of this kind would today mean little. Britain’s long-standing programme of economic self-immiseration makes it a country unlikely to beat Trump’s America in a property auction. If anyone buys Greenland, it will be the U.S. More profoundly, Britain has long since ceded its role as an acquisitively-minded global protagonist. Some modern Britons profess gladness that their country has given up its geopolitical say; others bemoan their country’s continuing enfeeblement.

As if the enfeeblement had not gone far enough, the current British government is conducting an expensive giveaway of the Chagos Islands in the Indian Ocean. The islands are the seat of a crucial military base, Diego Garcia, used by the U.S. as a landing strip for nuclear bombers. The islands’ giveaway, in which the distant nation of Mauritius will be paid $138m per year to allow the UK to lease back what was its own base, is being undertaken on the suggestion of the International Court of Justice’s bench of anti-Western wallet inspectors.

This unworldly modern Britain is hardly the “perfidious Albion” depicted in the propaganda of its 19th century geopolitical rivals. Not wholly unflatteringly, contemporary Russian state media still portrays the country as the shadowy orchestrator of coups and death squads. A truer depiction, though, is that of the “cash-poor, asset-rich elderly woman who has somehow inherited a portfolio of scattered, high-value properties she doesn’t know what to do with.”