KAP. 4.

C. Isle of Man
The Government and Legal System of the Isle of Man
Introduction
The Isle of Man is famous for its tailless cats, its kippers, and its
motor cycle races. It is even known for its fairies, and for men with
three legs! In reality it is rather different. The most important activity
on the island, in terms of employment, is now light engineering, and
the most important sources of revenue for the Island are now Banking,
Insurance and Shipping.
But a visitor to the Island will first notice the Victorian hotels and
boarding houses on the Douglas seafront, built for generations of holidaymakers
long since gone, and which now present a problem both for
the town planner and for the conservationist concerned with the preservation
of Victorian buildings. Away from Douglas, the visitor will
discover an attractive countryside of rolling hills and moorlands, cut by
mountain streams, and, in the coastal areas, small towns and villages
set amongst neat farms, with an ancient Celtic field system not unlike
that of parts of Ireland and Cornwall. But farmers and hoteliers now
form a small proportion of the Island’s population. As elsewhere in the
British Isles, traditional industries are in decline. Computer operators
outnumber fishermen and teachers outnumber farmers. In many respects
life in the Isle of Man is no different from that in mainland
Britain.
However, although the Island is in the north-western half of the
British Isles, and not many generations ago formed part of the Gaelic
speaking world with Ireland and Highland Scotland, it has become in
recent years, at least by the standards of north-west Britain, a relatively
prosperous place with an unemployment rate today of under 9%. This
modest prosperity is almost entirely due to the fact that the Island is
not, in constitutional and legal terms, part of mainland Britain, but has
its own Government and legal system.
Why does the Isle of Man, an island rather larger than the Isle of
Wight, but with a population of only 65,000, lying thirty to forty miles
to the west of Cumbria, have its own government? Geographically one
would have expected the Island to have been a small English or Scottish
county, or be part of, say Cumbria, or Galloway in Scotland, which
is the closest part of mainland Britain. Not only is the Island not part of
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