The Chagos Islands betrayal shames Britain. Here’s how we stop it

British Chagossians demonstrate in Westminster asking for the right to determine their own future
British Chagossians demonstrate in Westminster asking for the right to determine their own future - Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

“Chagos pour British!” they chanted, in the melodious creole of their ancestral archipelago. And any watching Brit could hardly fail to be moved. They were gathered outside our High Commission in Mauritius, a crowd of exiled Chagossians protesting against Labour’s handover of their islands. Simply by speaking those words, they were risking ten years in prison. In 2021, Mauritius made it a criminal offence to “misrepresent the sovereignty of Mauritius over any part of its territory”, a law aimed more or less explicitly at the Chagossian diaspora.

Chagossians are by no means alone in opposing Labour’s surrender. British voters dislike it. The incoming US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, says it “poses a serious threat to our national security interests.” Even the new Mauritian government, elected three weeks ago, is unconvinced. It has ordered an independent review into the proposed terms.

Why, then, is Sir Keir Starmer in such a rush? Why is his National Security adviser, Jonathan Powell, flying from Mauritius to Washington in an attempt to stitch everything up before Donald Trump’s inauguration? Why is he offering Mauritius colossal sums to take the territory? (If anything, Mauritius should be handing back, with six decades of compound interest, the £3 million that it was paid for renouncing its claim in 1965.) The answer lies in Labour’s obsession with identity politics.

Although some Mauritians were irredentists from the start, few showed much interest until 15 or so years ago. After all, the Chagos Islands were more than 1300 miles away. The first post-independence prime minister, Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam, explained that Mauritius had been happy to sell its rights to “a portion of our territory of which very few people knew, which is very far from here, and which we had never visited”.

Only much later, as Mauritius’s diplomatic and commercial relations with China deepened, did it press its claim in earnest. By presenting its case in anti-colonial terms, Mauritius was able to drum up support from several countries in the ‘Global South’ and, in 2019, to win an advisory opinion from the International Criminal Court.

Its argument was based on the idea that Britain had had no right to detach one colony from another – a bizarre notion which would also mean that St Kitts could claim Anguilla, Jamaica the Turks and Caicos Islands, India Burma and so on.

But Mauritius knew what buttons to press with woke officials. It hired a British KC, Philippe Sands, to argue its case. Sands, a co-founder of Matrix Chambers, is an old colleague of Starmer’s, and the two men share a fervent belief in the righteousness of human rights lawyers.

Might Starmer be doing his old buddy a favour? In the House of Commons, James Cleverly asked whether the two lawyers had had any unminuted discussions on the question of Mauritius’s claim. The minister, a decent fellow called Stephen Doughty, was too honest to deny it, replying: “We have engaged with a wide range of partners in these discussions.”

Whatever the explanation, I have a feeling that Starmer forgot about the Chagossians. He saw the handover in “decolonise” terms. His instinct was to side with the poorer country against the richer and the ex-colony against Britain.

But he can’t even get wokery right. In his eagerness to appease Mauritius, Starmer overlooked the genuinely injured party, namely the Chagossians, displaced by the then Labour government in 1967 to make room for the military base on Diego Garcia.

Perhaps 1,700 Chagossians were removed from the islands. That number has grown in exile to 10,000 of whom the biggest contingent, some 3,500, are in Crawley, next to Gatwick Airport where they originally landed.

I used to represent Crawley as an MEP, and had some dealings with them. Some wanted to return, others wanted all Chagossians to be allowed to settle in Britain (there are also diaspora communities in Mauritius and the Seychelles). None wanted to be Mauritian.

Two weeks ago, I spoke at a rally of 500 Chagossians at Hackney’s Round Chapel. They waved British Indian Ocean Territory flags, proclaimed their loyalty to the Crown and demanded to be heard. I don’t want to out-woke Labour here, but the actual victims are the people who lost their homes, not some distant island republic with an aggressive territorial claim against them.

There is now an opportunity to make good the injustice. The previous Mauritian government had announced that it intended to settle the outer atolls. It was not going to confine that right to Chagossians, whom it regards as so many Mauritians. Any Mauritian would be allowed to settle there. Ministers were talking excitedly of hotels and commercial fishing (Britain has until now maintained the seas around the Chagos Islands as a marine conservation area). Since Britain was happy to hand the territory away on that understanding, I don’t believe it is credible any more to deny a right of return to the outer islands – not Diego Garcia and its base – to Chagossians. Not all these atolls are viable, but some are accessible by seaplane from the Maldives. With the premium that the super-rich give to seclusion and exclusivity, who is to say that they might not house luxury resorts?

Perhaps local people might buy fares on the military flights that connect Diego Garcia to Singapore. Those flights do not carry only soldiers, but also civilian contractors, the police who maintain our sovereignty and, from time to time, the British Commissioner.

The Falkland Islands took off economically after the 1982 war, partly because Britain no longer hung back from exercising its fishing and energy rights, but mainly because islanders were now able to buy tickets on the regular RAF flights to Brize Norton.

A similar deal in the Chagos Islands would require the collaboration of the US military, which operates the Singapore link. But there is every reason to believe that the incoming American administration would see the return of a pro-British population to the territory as a further guarantee of their base’s security. Inhabited islands would be harder for a future government to abandon.

This episode has been calamitous for Labour, exposing its ignorance, pusillanimity and incompetence. We were assured by sophisticated mandarins that Britain was swapping hard power for soft, but that is not how diplomacy works.

The rest of the world saw, not high-mindedness, but feebleness. As soon as the deal was announced, they lined up to make their own claims against Britain. The Commonwealth summit in Samoa became a whinge-fest about reparations. (Reparations, to be clear, not from the African countries which took slaves, but from Britain which poured its blood and treasure into extirpating the slave trade.)

We need a different approach. Instead of constantly apologising, we should defend our interests like anyone else. Other governments are free to back the Mauritian claim or, indeed, to demand cash from the country that freed the slaves. But we should make clear that we regard such behaviour as unfriendly, and draw up our response accordingly, on everything from foreign aid to visas.

If that is too muscular for our present ministers, let me instead appeal to their sense of restitution. The people at the centre of this row have not been asked. So ask them. Make any deal subject to a consultative referendum among Chagossians.

I just voted for William Hague to be Chancellor of Oxford in an online poll that spanned five continents. Such elections are logistically feasible. You first ask people to verify their right to vote and then let them exercise it.

If Chagossians accept the deal, fine. But if they reject it, Britain should let them return home under the Union flag. We would thereby secure our base, shore up the Atlantic alliance, save ourselves a lot of money and reassure the nervous populations of Gibraltar, the Falklands and every other overseas territory.

More important, we would be behaving in a way that is moral rather than moralising. We would put actual virtue ahead of virtue signalling. We would right an old wrong.