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Since then, Starmer has withdrawn winter fuel payments from all but the poorest pensioners because the bond markets demanded it and cancelled arms sales to Israel because Foreign Office lawyers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.
In the letter Mancham argues that, instead, the Ministry of Overseas Development — which controlled the way aid was spent — argued that such a use of money did not improve the islanders’ “social welfare development.” And so no money was held and Manchem’s “pro-British government was toppled less than one year after independence by a few people trained in Tanzania — a country with a record for receiving British aid”.
In his letter, Mancham argued that Britain’s foreign policy was “ill conceived and out of touch with the reality of this world”. It is difficult to disagree with this assessment, either then or now. In a further twist of irony, Mancham wrote that, at around the same time, the British Government allotted India £25 million in aid for “social development purposes” whereupon India transferred £10 million to Mauritius, where living standards stood at around twice the level they were in India. That is the same Mauritius to which Britain has just transferred sovereignty of the Chagos Islands.
In 1980, Thatcher thanked the professors for sending her their “extremely useful” report which, she said, gave her an “independent measure against which to judge the proposals being put forward by officials”. It is time Starmer started recruiting his own independent advice, because he is currently trapped in a spiral of naive legalism both at home and abroad that is as “out of touch with the reality of this world” as in 1976. Just as importantly, it is out of touch with his promise to take back control.
Tom McTague is UnHerd’s Political Editor. He is the author of Between the Waves: The Hidden History of a Very British Revolution 1945-2016, due to be published in September 2025
TomMcTague
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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?
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.
Good.comment.
Remember all those lords who worked for CJ under companies? Well, I am sure there are still plenty of them around.
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.
Maybe the mag should rename itself NeoconHerd.
The likelihood of the Anglo-American empire still existing in 99 years seems unlikely to me, but no, let’s keep expensively poking our noses where they don’t belong.
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.
Yes it is the only relevant question, and no the article doesn’t give an answer.
Personally I can’t see any value to the UK in keeping it. Didn’t the UK withdraw from “East of Suez” decades ago?
Yes, but the Americans are active “East of Suez”.
And they still have their base there, so there’s no need for UK involvement at all.
Yes, and look how that worked out.
Better for the UK generally…
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?
Both definitely in the Indian Ocean. I have been to the latter many times.
Correct, obviously. Someone needs to tell the author though.
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.
Diego Garcia is in the Chagos Archipelago, not adjacent to it.
I suspect the Foreign Office mandarins wanted to tie up loose ends in the Indian Ocean, and Lammy acquiesced. Sounds like Lammy is well and truly housetrained, and only after three months
True, but the Quad point remains. Indeed Britain is not a member of Quad- it’s thus logical the US remains in charge.
The danger from China is more in Maldives and now Sri Lanka.
It hardly needs saying that Lammy is basically an idiot, as is the person who thought him fit to be Foreign Secretary.
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.
Same as when Gordon brown insisted that pension funds put a higher percentage into bonds, just when the stock market was at a low and bonds were high [in price, not in dividend %]. So the pension companies sold stock at the low point and bought bonds at the the top of the market, guaranteeing future poor returns for pensioners.
I think if you start with the premise that they believe Britain is a bad, no good, very guilty sort of place, and, ergo, anybody being punished or making a complaint against the taxpayer or the government should get what they ask for no questions asked, then they do, in fact, know what they are doing. And if the British government is definitionally bad, then there can be no harm in enjoying a few freebies while in charge of it.
dumb and dumber season 10!!!
The worry is that they DO know what they’re doing.
Don’t forget this is a party that only 40 years ago was riddled with Soviet apologists and probably let by a man in Moscow’s pay.
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
More worrying is the “encourager les autres” corollary. Now the Chagos Islands, next the Falklands or Gibraltar? As Starmer has declined to say that neither return option is not, and never will be an option, Argentina and Spain will start rattling their weapons again. Of course there is also a local precedent; giving in to the doctors and train drivers has, far from settling their issues, encouraged them to go on asking for more. So in one stroke they inflated to supposed £22bn hole in the economy, and then piled even more into the hole by promising £21bn for an untried and probably unworkable carbon capture scheme. My maths makes 22 + 21 = 43. And with no oil, gas (or coal) we are heading for industrial meltdown.
Forget the freebie scandal. Who elected these people?
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.
I looked at the Chagossian Islands on a map, and I can’t believe anyone would want to live there if they have a choice.
Taking back control the same way he’s accepted Brexit. Doublespeak is alive and kicking.
The.hyper-naivety of Starmer fullstop. I have never encountered anyone with so little “nous”. He’s blundering.from one disaster to the next. And we’re not talking Mr Bean.- I consider his government to be dangerous to Britain and her people between the dismal fiscal diatribe, the windmill energy religion ignoring dunkelflautte, labour regulation, deindustrialisation at a time when critical manufacture needs safeguarding, aligning to a sclerotic EU where Draghi’s latest pronouncement is “more Europe”, reforms to planning system predicated on CPOs for land (state seeking 100% of land value) whilst reducing London targets (one of the least dense “global” cities in the world), and dismantling of the one area of policy Cons got right.(teaching of 3Rs). We might survive it at the 37% expenditure to GDP under Brown 15 years ago, but at 100% little room for error. The UK is much more beholden to the “kindness of strangers” (the international bond market) than many countries.
Like the Yanks we now have a Government that is openly and enthusiastically destroying the country in plain sight.
This is why those of us living at the extremes of the Empire / Commonwealth, gave up trusting the UK sometime early in the 1900s.
The transfer back arrangements started under the last Govt. Wouldn’t have happened if US v strongly opposed. We underestimate how much we rely on them for security because much of that is covered by Official Secrets act. So absolutely no chance this has been done whilst strongly opposed by US administration.
And a 99 year lease means CCP isn’t sticking a base there anytime soon. There are plenty of Nations now also beginning to see help from China as much less benevolent than initially appeared and watching the way the maritime sovereignty of Philippines being abused won’t have been lost on many. India is the much bigger player in this vicinity in coming decades and will resist encroachment from CCP. There is a geopolitical calculation here that has to weigh up which way do we want them to lean.
Yes, entirely right.
Shouldn’t the wishes of the people who live there be taken into account? Oh sorry, silly me, I forgot that the bureaucrats are all-knowing and will always do what is best for everyone.
No, not so silly you this time HB. You’re right and the good sense of Starmer to see that has to be the determinant here and get on with it, and with what anything other would look like to India in one’s mind too.
You’re as naive as Starmer. We had sovereignty and could ensure the Chinese stayed out and the base stayed open. Now we just have to hope the Mauritian Government sticks to the treaty terms and isn’t overthrown, while simultaneously hoping the Chinese don’t just muscle in.
Mauritius gets more than a quarter of its imports from China. Who do you think will exert the greater influence on the Mauritian Government from now on, Britain or China? Doh!
If any consolation DU there was some concern about the Convention of Peking in 1898.
Seventy percent of the population in Mauritius are of Indian descent. So India will have a lot of Influence there. India (Modi) is also pro Russia. He is also anti Britain.
Too simplistic an assessment of India. Maybe the UK needs to shift it’s pro Pakistan mentality.
India is a member of Quad led by the US, as also of Brics. It has been non aligned since Nehru.
Does anyone doubt that Starmer is a naive self-righteous left-wing do-gooder who feels the need to prostrate himself, his party and the country to feel good.
He believes Britain is bad with historical sins to atone for and is determined to make the innocent of today pay to sooth his soul and that of the country.
Nothing is actually going to change in Diego Garcia. The base will stay, and operations will continue. Meanwhile a legal headache has gone. Good outcome.
” the strategically-important Pacific outcrop called the Chagos Islands”
“another Pacific colony, the Seychelles”
FFS.
The last time I looked at an atlas both the British Indian Ocean Territory, which includes the Chagos archipelago, and the Seychelles, were in the Indian Ocean. So was Mauritius, which is now set to take over Chagos. Tom McTague is perhaps not as naive as David Lammy, but he appears to be on a geographical par with him.
David Eades
The agreement has been welcomed by Biden, so now we know it’s a foreign policy disaster.
We can’t even stand up to Mauritius!?!
Why do I see new expensive villas in Mauritius being built as presents ?
There is a lot of solid international law behind this decision and a lot of irrelevant stuff in the piece.
Labour are dodos.
They’re an even worse Shower of S**t than the Tories!
I think Lammy’s reason for the ‘return’ of the islands to people who live an extremely long way from it and have zero connection with it historically or ethnically is classic, and would have been much appreciated by George Orwell as an example of newspeak.
I think John Murray is correct. The Left believe that the UK is an exploitive capitalist patriarchy which has robbed and colonized many native peoples, and endangered the planet. So Starmer’s govt policies are consistent with the aim of punishing the country for its sins.