Editor;
The news that the British embassy in Bangkok is to be sold to commercial developers for around 18 billion baht (400 million pounds) is causing a lot of expat confusion. The embassy gains nothing from the deal as the British government in UK is in the driving seat and all the cash will go into state coffers. Consequently, the hopes that the windfall can be used to reduce embassy fees (which are set world-wide in London anyway) or to improve frontline services in Thailand are a total misunderstanding.
British embassies are not the independent agencies of popular imagination but must obey Foreign Office directives from London. Embassies no longer issue passports but merely pass on documentation to UK, whilst the issuing of visas is now subject to partial privatization and central bureaucratic control. In fact, much of the work in Thailand is no longer handled by the main site embassy but by rented office premises at Trendy House in Bangkok’s Sukhumvit 13.
All this, of course, is to do with saving money. The British consulate in Pattaya closed in 2012 and the one in Chiang Mai in 2015. Anyone requiring assistance these days has no alternative to reading the Bangkok website or phoning the switchboard where a human voice is not a foregone conclusion. For all these reasons, there is no real purpose anymore in maintaining a plum real estate plot in central Bangkok. A few old hands will look back with nostalgia on the garden parties of yesteryear, but post-Brexit Britain poses a very different scenario.
Barry Kenyon
Pattaya
