Labour’s woke surrender of the Chagos Islands makes Britain look pathetic
We might as well be governed by the National Union of Students. In pursuit of their juvenile, half-witted anti-colonialism, Labour ministers have betrayed our strategic interests, delighted our enemies, weakened our alliance with the United States, set a terrifying precedent for the British populations of Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands and, not least, let down the Chagossian people.
I am almost too angry to write about the abandonment of the British Indian Ocean Territory. It’s like watching one of your children handing over all their money to a cult. You can’t stop them, but it’s a horrible thing to have to witness. Mauritius has never exercised sovereignty over the Chagos Islands, which lie 1337 miles from its shores.
Until recently, the Mauritian government showed little interest in that sparse and distant atoll. But now, whether pushed by China or simply encouraged by the self-hating wokery of the British political establishment, Mauritius has acquired the territory and somehow got Britain to pay. Diego Garcia, the largest island in the chain, is the Malta of the Indian Ocean, occupying a perfect strategic position.
Half way between Africa and Indonesia, it lies within reach of four of the seven global choke points that funnel maritime traffic: the Bab-el-Mandeb, the Straits of Hormuz, the Malacca Straits and the Cape of Good Hope. The Anglo-American base built after 1968 has proved its military value again and again. In 1991, waves of B52s took off from its runway to bomb Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait.
A goodly part of the campaign against the Taliban was waged from there ten years later. The Permanent Joint Operating Base stands as the supreme physical manifestation of the Anglo-American alliance, under whose aegis freedom flourishes across the continents. Is this a wise moment to pull out? When Iran is hurling missiles at Israel? When China is busily building runways over every coral reef it can enlarge?
In public, President Biden backs the deal, which leaves Britain with a 99-year lease on the base. Privately, though, the Americans had been warning that 99 years is as an eye-blink to China and that, long before then, Mauritius might lease neighbouring islets to the world’s fastest-growing naval power. Why was Sir Keir Starmer in such a hurry? Whom was he trying to please? Corbynite activists? Matrix Chambers lawyers? If he believes that handing away British territory will win us goodwill in the Global South, he misunderstands both diplomacy and human psychology.
The surrender does not make us look generous; it makes us look pathetic. Our generation is weirdly obsessed by an empire that no longer exists. In most former Crown colonies, there is more resentment now than there was during, or immediately after, British rule. People who have grown up since independence believe a cartoonish version of anti-colonialism that their grandparents would not have recognised. They have picked it up largely from British universities.
The Labour Party, a product and champion of that same “decolonise” obsession, brings its prejudices to almost any international dispute, instinctively siding with former colonies against former powers, with non-white against white populations, with poorer against wealthier countries and with almost anywhere against Britain or America. Yet the argument over the British Indian Ocean Territory cannot easily be shoehorned into an anti-imperialist narrative.
The islands are not being handed to their original inhabitants, but to a distant state to whom Chagossians feel little loyalty. To grasp the enormity of what Labour is doing, we need to recall some history. The Chagos Islands were uninhabited until 1783, when the French established a plantation there and imported African slaves to work it. In 1810, as part of its war against Napoleon, Britain seized France’s Indian Ocean territories, including Mauritius, the Seychelles and the Chagos Archipelago. (“A capital notion,” says Jack Aubrey, the fictional hero of Patrick O’Brian’s naval novels, when the plan is outlined. “It has always seemed absurd to me that islands should not be English. Unnatural.”)
France formally ceded the islands to the British Crown in 1814, and Britain went on to free the Chagossian slaves, who remained on the islands, working on sugar and coconut plantations and as fishermen. Fast forward to 1965. Mauritius was in no hurry to leave the British Empire. Several of its politicians were pressing to be allowed to join the UK with representation at Westminster. But Britain was intent on pulling out of Africa. It did, however, want an Indian Ocean base, and so hived off the Chagos Islands.
The Mauritians raised few objections. The Chagos Archipelago was, as their first post-independence leader, Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam, later put it, “a portion of our territory of which very few people knew, which is very far from here, and which we had never visited”. To put the matter beyond any dispute, Britain offered the sum of £3 million as a sweetener. Mauritius gladly took the cash, and all sides declared the matter closed.
Now we come to a genuine tragedy. The construction of the base required the removal of the local population, then numbering between 1,000 and 2,000. Some were evacuated to the Seychelles, some to Mauritius, which, in 1972, was paid a further £650,000 to settle them. The Mauritian authorities did not disburse the money until many years later, when its value had been eroded by inflation. Many Chagossians – “Ilois”, as locals dismissively called them – ended up in slums.
Several Chagossians have moved to Britain. Indeed, there are more of them in Crawley today than there were on Diego Garcia in 1968. Crawley was part of my old Euro-constituency, and I was always touched by their efforts to sustain their language and folkways far from their ancestral seas. To be honest, I was more often lobbied about the right to settle here than the right to return to the islands; but one thing I never heard was a demand to come under Mauritian sovereignty.
“Mauritian officials have claimed that Chagossians who seek to be represented in the negotiations are no more than British pawns,” says Admiral Lord West, a former Labour minister and one of the few British parliamentarians to have spent time on the islands. He is right. In 2021, Mauritius made it an offence, punishable by up to ten years in prison, to “misrepresent the sovereignty of Mauritius over any part of its territory”.
The law applies worldwide, meaning that, by writing this article, I theoretically risk a stretch in chokey. Remind me: who are the colonialist oppressors here? Labour claims that its 99-year lease secures the base, but every aspect of the story to date tells us that no British settlement is treated as final. Mauritius sold its claims in 1965. It was paid again in 1972.
It then reneged and agitated for sovereignty, with the international courts in support. Our craven Foreign Office officials urged talks, but David Cameron put a stop to them. Labour’s rush to reverse his decision is as dishonest as anything it has done. The transfer was not in its manifesto. As recently as 24 September, in response to a question from my colleague Lord Kempsell, the government declared that it was “too early to speculate on timelines or conclusions”.
Nine days later, we were presented with a fait accompli. Since lying to Parliament is a serious offence, we can only conclude that this was the fastest negotiation in history. Incredibly, as well as setting aside more cash for the Chagossians, Britain has agreed to pony up yet more for Mauritius: “To enable this partnership the UK will provide a package of financial support to Mauritius.”
To summarise, Britain is giving up the most important piece of real estate in the Indian Ocean and has somehow ended up paying for the privilege. China, which sees Mauritius as its key regional ally, is goggling at us with incredulous glee. Labour, after promising growth, has delivered shrinkage – literally and figuratively. We are in every sense diminished as a nation.