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October 3, 2024 - 5:45pm
During his speech to his party’s annual conference in Liverpool last month, Keir Starmer argued that “taking back control” was a Labour argument. The reasoning behind this, for the Prime Minister, was that only the Labour Party believed in the kind of decisive government able to control the great international forces which affect people’s lives.
Since then, Starmer has withdrawn winter fuel payments from all but the poorest pensioners because the bond markets demanded it and cancelled arms sales to Israel because Foreign Office lawyers said he must. Today, he continued this theme by giving up British control of the strategically-important Pacific outcrop called the Chagos Islands, in part because the International Court of Justice at the Hague told him to.
“This government inherited a situation where the long-term, secure operation of the Diego Garcia military base was under threat, with contested sovereignty and ongoing legal challenges,” Foreign Secretary David Lammy explained in his statement defending the move. By agreeing to transfer sovereignty of the islands to Mauritius, albeit with a 99-year lease that can be extended, Lammy argued, this uncertainty had been brought to an end, allowing the Government with rather Orwellian logic to “strengthen Britain’s role in safeguarding global security”. He also suggested the decision would guarantee Britain’s long-term relationship with Mauritius. The naivety in the statement is almost touching.
A quick look through Britain’s recent history provides a glimpse of how such agreements tend to pan out. In 1976, Britain granted independence to another Pacific colony, the Seychelles. Within a year there had been a coup, ousting the democratically-elected Seychellois leader Sir James Mancham in favour of the Soviet-backed France-Albert René who quickly thereafter signed a maritime agreement with Moscow and ruled the country as a one-party state for the rest of the Cold War.
In a secret report delivered to Margaret Thatcher in 1980 by a group of hawkish Cold War historians, the case of the Seychelles was held up as an example of what happened when Western governments failed to act without sufficient resolve and intelligence. The report even went so far as to attach a letter written to the Sunday Times by Mancham — by then living in exile in London — complaining about the Foreign Office’s ineptitude.
“After winning three popular elections to get the Seychelles integrated with Britain, when the British government of the day decided to pull out East of Suez, Whitehall suddenly brought pressure on me to change for a policy of independence,” Mancham wrote. “I agreed on one condition, that the British government would, before independence, help us build an intelligence unit to monitor local and regional intelligence and develop para-military capability to deter the possibility of an internal insurrection.” In Mancham’s words, the Foreign Office “categorically agreed” and then failed to do so.
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SubscribeIt was obvious the lefties were going to be this stupid and vacuous.
How soon before there is a Chinese base in the Chagos?
I find this government baffling. 1.Cave in to unions without getting them back to work, 2.Release dangerous prisoners early because of somewhat cramped conditions in some parts of some prisons, 3. Accept millions of benefits-in-kind from every shady chancer that offered, 4. Withdraw the winter fuel allowance as the price of gas goes up.
And now 5. Giving away British territory for no discernible reason.
It’s like they don’t know what they are doing.
Provided they remain reliably wrong on every decision (and they pretty much are so far), there’s still the possibility to profit from their ineptitude. You just take the other end of the bet. Of course, you need to stop caring about what happens to the UK.
When they are so reliably wrong, it can no longer be chance. But that’s the actual policy. Not knowing what they’re doing principally applies to the actual execution of policy. And there’s no doubt at all that they don’t know what they’re doing there.
Note also how keen Rachel Reeves has been about investing your pension (yes, directing how your personal savings should be invested) into private equity investments. A dead cert signal that the PE market has peaked when the dumbest, least sophisticated buyer in the market finally wants to buy in.
It seems to be even worse than the author suggested since Labour appears to have a motive of buddying up to China, with this being an opening gift of goodwill.
Is their strategic value in keeping Chagos? That should be the only relevant question IMO. I’m not sure the author answered this question adequately.
It has two important assets. It is a major marine reserve which will now be plundered by the Chinese. It is an important strategic asset used by the Americans – now they don’t owe us for its use but the government of Mauritius.
The author needed to have done more research. Mauritius is possibly tieing up with both the US and India in the case of Chagos.
While the internal dynamics of Starmer’s decision are not known, it is also true that there is a Quad angle to this.
Diego Garcia is not far away, and there is a big US base there.
Have both these groups of islands, Chagos and Seychelles, migrated from the Indian to the Pacific Oceans?
.Is this Continental Drift?
Or Climate Change?
Or Plate Tectonics?
Or Asylum Seeking?
Before today, I didn’t know that there was such a thing as the Chagos Islands, let alone that they were British.
The Conservatives had been all ready to do the same thing with the Chagos Islands. It is the wrong question, but while those may be a long way from Mauritius, they are an awful lot further from Britain.
Warmly welcomed by the United States, Britain has saved the American base, which is the problem, and for which we are going to be paying the rent. They use the dollar on Diego Garcia, they drive on the right, and if your British passport could get you there, then the Chagossians would have done it by now. They were wronged by a Labour Government, another Labour Government compounded the wrong, and the base was crucial to that latter’s catastrophic wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Mauritians have also mistreated them, but why are this Labour Government ostensible opponents so keen to defend previous Labour Governments’ abuse of British citizens in the service of a foreign power?
The Americans would be indifferent as to a transfer of the Falkland Islands to Argentina, or of Gibraltar to Spain, and most or all of the United States would have a public holiday to inaugurate the United Ireland that most people, whether they liked it or not, now regarded an inevitability in this generation, as it would have been no matter what had happened in the last one.
There was no referendum before the forced eviction of the British inhabitants of the Chagos Islands by Denis Healey, who went on to inflict monetarism on Britain, all in all making him one of the most disgraceful politicians that even Britain has ever produced. But there has been a referendum in the Falkland Islands, and there has been a referendum in Gibraltar. The rules are different for white people.
There are now a lot of Saint Helenians on the Falklands, but they are never shown on television over here. The people who decide these things know their audience. At the 2022 Festival of Remembrance, there were teenagers from the Falklands who were studying in Britain. They were all white. That was not an accurate reflection. But it was a politic one. As Margaret Thatcher said, “They are of British stock.”
Meanwhile, since the British Right always needs a Fatherland away from the National Health Service, the present one is Argentina. Even as Javier Milei goes cap-in-hand to China. Leaving aside on which of them apart from Diego Garcia it could possibly be, what would a Chinese base on a Chagos Island be used for? An invasion of Britain? If not, then why should we care?
The point here is the injustice against the Chagossian people. By a Labour Government, and compounded by another one when David Miliband had his ruse to turn the archipelago into a marine protection area. They are so numerous in Crawley because they were simply dumped at Gatwick Airport, often sleeping for weeks on the seats and the floor. We shall see, but this deal would seem to do little or nothing for them, as the Mauritians have always done little or nothing for them. I do hope that I am wrong. This deal has been welcomed by valiant veterans in this field, very close to the Chagossians themselves, such as Mark Seddon and Jeremy Corbyn. From his parliamentary base, Corbyn should and will keep a very close eye on developments.
On 24 September, I do not think that Baroness Chapman of Darlington was lying when she told the House of Lords that it was “too early to speculate on timelines of conclusions”. She was honestly mistaken, because why would anyone tell her something like this? Her Ministerial salary is purely child support. And that is why that story matters.