A quick reminder that via this swim, I’m raising money to support the excellent marine conservation work of the Manx Wildlife Trust and Blue Marine Foundation via this Justgiving page
Tweeting from @michaelpmdavis
Thursday’s swim began on Fenella beach: a surf-pounded cove underneath Peel castle whose high tide mark is traced by a pastel mosaic of sea-rubbed scallop shards.
Fenella is my Mum’s name and also the name of one of the main protagonists in the historical novel ‘Peveril of the Peak’ by Sir Walter Scott (author of Rob Roy and Ivanhoe). Much of the action in this story is set in Peel Castle. Fenella is described as
“of the least and slightest size of womankind [and] exquisitely well formed in all her limbs… Her countenance resembled a most beautiful miniature; and there was a quickness, decision, and fire, in Fenella’s look, and especially in her eyes, which was probably rendered yet more alert and acute, because, through the imperfection of her other organs, it was only by sight that she could obtain information of what passed around her.”
In fact it later transpires (spoiler alert) that Fenella is not really mute but a deep cover spy and part of an elaborate revenge plot, which unravels when she, (inevitably?), falls for the hunky Peveril.
Peel Castle sits on St Patrick’s Isle, which resembles a semi-submerged meteorite so perfect for a castle it might have been designed by my eight year old self. The islet has been in use for about a thousand years as a Viking stronghold, a burial ground and a cathedral as well as a castle. According to the handsome, and very heavy, ‘A New History of the Isle of Man; Volume 3 – The Medieval Period’, excavations reveal that the diet of its inhabitants previously included seabirds such as cormorant, kittiwake, shag and shearwater and shellfish such as limpets, dog whelks and winkles.
The last time I swam around the castle, eight years ago, I was stalked by a couple of seals that cornered me in a cave just beneath the turret known as Fenella’s Tower. A day or so later I saw what may have been one of the same animals loitering off the end of the jetty. The reason why soon became clear: a group of local school kids and a Jamaican hospital orderly fishing there had hit a shoal of mackerel. Each time one of them got a bite, it was then a race between their reeling and the seal’s pouncing. In most cases the seal won.
The fishing crew did, however, catch enough mackerel to give me some to take home and cook. I proceeded to fill the house with an oily smog which had a lasting and traumatic impact on the eating preferences of my wife and our unborn daughter.
No seals on Thursday. But the sea was beginning to heave and it would have been hazardous to stay close in to the rocks. There was another reason for keeping my distance, though: the sewage slick that slides out from the harbour area, forming a disturbingly still pathway over the sea’s surface.
There is, apparently, a proper treatment plant on the way. I hope it comes soon – Peel Castle offers a stunning backdrop to any immersion and St Patrick’s Isle a wonderful circuit to swim around. As it was, I spent about half a kilometre with my face out of the water, doing my first breaststroke swim of the journey so far. Born of necessity, perhaps, but I tried to think of it as a small homage to Mercedes Gleitze, who swam round the entire island doing breaststroke. That’s something that no long distance swimmer would contemplate today – the received wisdom is that it’s too slow and inefficient and puts too much pressure on the joints.
Aerial acrobatics
On and off over the course of the three and a half hours in the water I was aware of fulmars – stocky, stiff-winged relatives of shearwaters and albatrosses – hawking around just overhead. But it was only when we were about a kilometre short of Glen Moar that I realised just how many had congregated above Steve and I. They put on a stunning aerial display. Comparing birds with aeroplanes is a terrible cliché but I find a bit hard to resist here. Fulmars don’t do a lot of flapping. There is – compared to a bird like a gull – little flex in their wings as they fly and they really do appear to bank, swoop and circle in much the same way as a small plane.
A difference is that in the force 6 strength winds – that might make many pilots think twice about getting airborne – the fulmars were absolutely in their element. Wheeling upwards to capture some of that energy, they would then stoop to water’s film before skimming along the troughs formed by the waves.
Fulmars aren’t great walkers on land but here they were putting down their dainty little pinkies and running along the surface of the sea for a metre or so at a time before performing a vertical take-off. I suspect they may have hoped that Steve and my activities might visit some level of carnage on the local fish population that they could profit from. I must have been a big disappointment as my blunderings can only have put to flight the toothsome creatures they were hunting.
I asked Neil Morris, the Managing Director of Manx Birdlife, about what I had seen. Here’s his response:
“Fulmars are one of the seabirds most readily attracted to fishing boats – indeed their rapid population spread southwards from Iceland during the 1900s was a result of their habit of hoovering up trawler bycatch. They are not shy birds and will approach people in/on the water. But you wouldn’t want to tackle one as, in self-defence, they can eject the most grisly sticky spit. It stinks of putrid fish and doesn’t wash out easily! They are boisterous, curious and noisy birds and brilliant flyers (the nearest we have on the IOM to albatrosses) and quite harmless unless you get just that little bit too close!”
Triumphs, taxes and transparency
Getting around the Island this week has been getting trickier as the Manx Grand Prix motorbike racing festival has got into full swing. The Manx GP is the more sedate counterpart to the TT Races – it uses the same circuit but is geared more towards enthusiasts than professionals. One of those attending this year’s event, travelling to the Island on a Triumph Tiger Sport, is a friend of mine, John Christensen, whom I had a chance to catch up with yesterday afternoon.
For 11 years John, who trained as a forensic auditor and economist, was economic adviser to the government of the Isle of Man’s fellow Crown Dependency, Jersey. Increasingly disenchanted with Jersey’s role in enabling tax dodging and money laundering, however, he left to set up the not for profit organisation Tax Justice Network. Since then he has become what the Guardian has described as “the unlikely figurehead of a worldwide campaign against tax avoidance.”
I asked John what drew him to the Isle of Man.
“I enjoy meeting and talking with people, and on all my
visits here I’ve met a diverse mix of interesting people who discuss with
passion and courtesy. So refreshing in an age of polarisation and anger.
The island has so much history and geographical diversity. On this trip we’ve
explored Castletown, the nature reserves west of the Point of Ayre, and
Peel. Being ten times larger than Jersey, yet with a smaller population,
Man feels uncrowded, relaxed, and unspoilt by rampant consumerism.
What’s not to love about the Manx GP? I’m here with friends to watch the
road racing, which is about as good as it gets. We’ve watched from
Ramsey, Ballaugh Bridge, the hairpin at mile 37 and other spots. Awesome talent
and courage from all the riders. I think I should volunteer as a marshal next
time.”
John has visited the Isle of Man on many occasions over the past three decades. He told me that he has always been impressed by its relative openness and civility when it comes to sensitive debates about the financial services sector that dominates the Island’s economy.
He worries, though, that the Isle of Man has fallen victim to the same ‘finance curse’ phenomenon that has affected his native Jersey and is the subject of a recent book of the same name that he contributed to. John’s concern is that the Island has got itself into a situation where its financial services industries are much too powerful, politically, and have pushed up property prices and living costs to a point where it is almost impossible for other types of business to emerge and flourish.
The Tax Justice Network that John founded publishes regular reports on levels of secrecy and tax policies of offshore financial centres and he showed me a couple of the most recent ones relating to the Isle of Man. They are less than flattering.
The Corporate Tax Haven Index, launched just three months ago, “ranks the world’s most important tax havens for multinational corporations, according to how aggressively and how extensively each jurisdiction contributes to helping the world’s multinational enterprises escape paying tax, and erodes the tax revenues of other countries around the world. It also indicates how much each place contributes to a global ”race to the bottom” on corporate taxes.”
The Isle of Man comes in at #17. That places it behind – so not as bad as – fellow UK Crown Dependencies Jersey (#9) and Guernsey (#15), as well as chart-toppers The British Virgin Islands. It compares unfavourably, however, with such less than reputable jurisdictions as Malta (#23), Panama (#26) and Liechtenstein (#37). The Island’s scorecard shows a clean sweep of red cards for ‘Loopholes and Gaps’, ‘Transparency’, ‘Anti-avoidance’ measures and ‘Double Tax Treaty Aggressiveness’ and an aggregated score of 100 out of 100 in terms of how corrosive its tax policies are to the global economy.
John points out that the Isle of Man’s score is actually worse than those of Jersey and Guernsey and it only ranks below them because it is a smaller global player.
I asked John what he thought about the arguments made by some on the Isle of Man that it should not be labelled a tax haven. His first reaction was to laugh, before saying that
“Huff and puff as they may about not being a tax haven, the evidence tells its own story. There is no point in having this discussion. It’s like someone with a serious drug problem: no one believes you, it’s not credible, so stop saying it; you are just making life worse for yourself.”
Tax Justice Network’s Financial Secrecy Index, established in 2009, is published on a two year cycle. It “ranks jurisdictions according to their secrecy and the scale of their offshore financial activities. A politically neutral ranking, it is a tool for understanding global financial secrecy, tax havens or secrecy jurisdictions, and illicit financial flows or capital flight.” Here the Isle of Man doesn’t fare so badly, coming in at #42, with its secrecy rating in the yellow, rather than the red.
Perhaps this secrecy level is in line with John’s observations on how the Isle of Man does at least allow space for a measured debate about the role of its financial services in a way that Jersey – where the political establishment has been ruthless in shutting down any such discussions – does not.
I’m interested in this question of secrecy because a good portion of the work that my own organisation, Global Witness, does, concerns corruption and money laundering that is enabled by lack of transparency. Many of the cases my colleagues have investigated concern offshore financial centres, but those that most commonly figure are the likes of the British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands and Singapore, not to mention the UK and U.S. I’ll try to come back to this question of financial secrecy in the Isle of Man, and what the implications might be, in my next couple of posts.
Mike's Isle of Man swim 2019 