Just when you think Labour could not be any more limp or dimwitted, they do this. After years of wrangling, Sir Keir Starmer has reversed the previous government’s position and given away the British Indian Ocean Territory.
We are surrendering the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, a country that lies 1,300 miles away and has never exercised sovereignty there – or, until recently, showed much interest in the area. In doing so, we are imperilling a key strategic asset, which will now come under the jurisdiction of a Chinese client state.
And what are we getting in return? Nothing. Nothing at all. Indeed, we are paying for the privilege of pulling out. What fools we are. What cowardly, wretched, self-hating fools.
A little history. The Chagos archipelago is exquisite, distant and sparse. It comprises some 60 coral islands, roughly half way between Tanzania and Indonesia. Being so remote, the reefs and atolls were uninhabited until the French settled them with African slaves in the late 18th century.
In 1810, at the height of the wars between Britain and France, the Royal Navy seized France’s Indian Ocean colonies, including Mauritius and the Chagos Islands.
‘A capital notion,’ says Jack Aubrey, the hero of Patrick O’Brian’s naval novels, when he learns of the plan. ‘It has always seemed absurd to me that islands should not be English. Unnatural.’
Sir Keir Starmer has reversed the previous government’s position and given the British Indian Ocean Territory (or Chagos Islands) to Mauritius
Britain later freed the slaves, who remained on the islands speaking a French-derived creole and working on coconut and sugar plantations as craftsmen and as fishermen. And so things stood until the 1960s, when Britain began to hand independence to its African colonies.
Although there was no wish to hang on to Mauritius, there was a recognition of the strategic value of retaining a base in the Indian Ocean. So, as a prelude to quitting Mauritius, the Chagos Islands became a separate territory in 1965. Mauritius received £3million as part of the settlement. All sides agreed to the deal.
From 1968, a major air base was constructed on one of the islands, Diego Garcia. In order to make room for it, the local Chagossians were evicted – 960 from Diego Garcia, and some hundreds more from the surrounding islets. A few moved to the Seychelles, but most to Mauritius or the UK. There are now more Chagossians within five miles of Gatwick Airport than there were on Diego Garcia in 1968.
The Chagossians are represented by various campaign groups, which don’t always see eye to eye. Some want to return to the islands, others want every Chagossian to have the right to come to Britain. Few, in my experience, are enthusiastic about coming under Mauritian sovereignty.
In other words, we are not acting out of a desire to make restitution to the islanders. We are acting to appease Mauritius which, having renounced all claim to the islands as a condition of its independence, began to revive that claim in earnest in the early 21st century.
Why did it suddenly become interested? Boris Johnson, writing in these pages a year ago, argued that the campaign ‘began about ten years ago, when some nameless individual in the then Department for International Development decided Mauritius no longer qualified for overseas aid.’ Mauritius, says the former PM, responded in pique by banging the anti-colonialist drum.
The Anglo-American airbase Diego Garcia was constructed in 1968 and is of critical military value throughout the regionÂ
There might also be strategic considerations. In 2009, Mauritius hosted a state visit from the Chinese president. China has financed numerous projects on the island, including its main airport and, in 2019, Mauritius became one of the only states in the region to sign a free-trade agreement with the Communist tyranny.
Why was Beijing so interested in a nation with little more than a million inhabitants? We can only speculate. But it might have had something to do with Mauritius’s historical claim against the chief Western military asset in the region.
It is hard to exaggerate the importance of the Diego Garcia base. This is not a garrison that exists largely to defend its local territory, like that in the Falkland Islands. No, the Anglo-American airbase in the Indian Ocean is of critical military value throughout the region.
It was from this runway that American bombers took off to drive Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1991. It was from here that a brave part of the campaign against the Taliban was waged in 2001. During the second war against Saddam in 2003, the base proved its value again.
British and American forces have fought side by side in innumerable conflicts over the past century. Freedom arguably has no stronger defender than the Anglo-American alliance. And that base amid the sparkling blue waves is the physical embodiment of it.
Is it not at least possible that China, which has been building military bases on every island it can – sometimes building the islands themselves in order to do so – might have an interest in seeing us edged out? Is it not conceivable that Mauritius, increasingly dependent on Chinese finance, might want to make itself useful to its patron?
It is true that Britain has secured a 99-year lease on the base. But let us not dress that concession up as anything other than a defeat. We are abandoning the rest of the archipelago, and with it our stewardship of the surrounding seas, which we had treated as a marine sanctuary. We are making the base less secure.
To repeat, what are we getting in return? Yes, the Chagossians have a legitimate grievance. To be removed from your home, howsoever remote and poor that home, is an injustice. Britain has sought to remedy that injustice, both by allowing Chagossians to settle here and through financial compensation. Mauritius was paid a lump sum to accept some of the displaced islanders, and is now going to be paid again. As the government statement yesterday put it, ‘to enable this partnership the UK will provide a package of financial support to Mauritius’.
So, to summarise, we are giving away a key strategic asset, one which underpins the American alliance, to a state that never controlled it, and to which the indigenous people feel little loyalty. We are doing so at an especially perilous time in world affairs, and when our strategic rivals will seek to exploit our withdrawal. And we are paying all over again to compensate the state which, having pocketed the original settlement, and the cash that came with it, has now broken that deal to revive its claim.
Does anyone imagine that we will be more respected as a result? Of course not. We will be seen in the Global South as chumps and wimps.
Sadly, Starmer and his crew view everything through woke and anti-colonial lenses. Britain is presumed to be in the wrong, and any ex-colony to be in the right – however unreasonable its pretensions.
Whatever the faults of the last government, it had been making Global Britain a reality. Through the Aukus deal (between the UK, US and Australia), the Pacific trade pact and our strategic partnership with India, we had been recovering our ancient vocation as a maritime nation that looked to the Asia-Pacific region.Â
Now, we have thrown away our greatest asset in that region, and paid for the privilege. What an utter disgrace.
